Andy Greenberg details how blockchain analysis dismantled the dark web, exposing Ross Ulbricht's Silk Road and Alexander Kaz's Alpha Bay through techniques pioneered by Sarah Meiklejohn and firms like Chainalysis. While Kaz died in Thai custody under disputed circumstances, law enforcement expanded operations to Hansa using malware-laced YubiKeys, yet markets persist via Monero. Greenberg further connects these cyber battles to geopolitical stakes, confirming GRU state-sponsored hacking of the DNC via WikiLeaks and arguing that despite "Russiagate" skepticism, evidence supports Russian interference while affirming support for Ukraine against ongoing invasion. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Finding Bitcoin's First Believer00:12:50
You're a busy guy.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I guess I've been sort of like talking about this book a lot, but also looking for the next big stories in this whole weird hacker world.
Yeah, it's always fun for me to talk to people like yourself who are like established, real, like big time journalists.
You know, I'm very used to talking to like the small time, like independent YouTube journalists.
I mean, I've heard the people you have on, like these sort of independent YouTube journalists are often like digging up the most interesting stuff and like doing the craziest.
Adventures.
So, you know, I'm, I feel, I don't know, kind of lucky that I have like a pretty established media job, but I still get to go on these weird, down these strange rabbit holes and, you know, take time to do investigations and books every few years.
What got you interested initially in this whole like crypto dark web hacker world?
Yeah, let's see.
I mean, I have covered this world of cybersecurity and hackers and surveillance and the dark web and all of that for, I mean, Before the dark web even existed, since like 2007 or so.
And I don't know, I came to it in this weird way of I had tried to be a China journalist.
And then I went to journalism school, and I found that in journalism school, it's hard to find stories because you're like just in school.
You're not like out in the world.
So I sort of turned to the internet instead.
And I don't know, I'm just like, I've always been like the kind of reporter I think who looks for like weird and geeky and like strange underworld kind of stories anyway.
So that.
Worked out for me, and I got a job at Forbes magazine.
And a few years into being Forbes's kind of hacker, cybersecurity, like internet underworld reporter, which nobody really thought was even a job back then.
I think that Forbes was kind of like a little skeptical that that could even be a full time beat.
I mean, I came upon this phenomenon, which was described to me as a kind of like anonymous and potentially.
Untraceable sort of digital currency, which was Bitcoin.
This was 2011 or so.
And I'd been, I guess, at that point, writing about this movement called the Cypherpunks.
I had written like a cover story for Forbes about WikiLeaks, and I was writing a book about WikiLeaks and the way that it came out of this cypherpunk movement of these radical libertarians who believed that they could use encryption to take power away from governments and give it to individuals, like carve out spaces on the internet, like the dark web, essentially.
Where the government can't reach and where you can do black market transactions and communicate in total secrecy.
And that seemed to me to be this incredibly sexy, fascinating world where there were going to be really dangerous, interesting things happening for years and years to come.
And so when I came upon Bitcoin, it seemed to me to be the kind of holy grail of that world.
Like, this is real crypto money now.
Like, not just secret communications, but secret financial transactions.
And that's going to unlock this and monetize this whole online black market.
And shortly after that, that's when the Silk Road appeared, the first dark web drug market that traded, of course, only in drugs, but for Bitcoin.
And it seemed to me to prove yes, like this is working.
Like, cryptocurrency, or we barely called it that at the time, but Bitcoin seemed to be unlocking it and like, you know, Creating this flourishing new lucrative world where you could buy and sell and also put into your body anything you wanted without government intervention.
I guess, you know, fast forward to 2020 or so.
I mean, that's a big fast forward.
But by 2020, I began to realize how incredibly wrong I had been about that.
How, in fact, it turns out that Bitcoin was the opposite of untraceable.
I wasn't just a little bit wrong about this, I was completely incorrect.
And in fact, so were all of the people in those early days who had told me that Bitcoin was untraceable or anonymous, including, I should say, the The mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, had advertised Bitcoin in an email to this cryptography mailing list as, among other things, like in these bullet points sort of advertising it.
Satoshi had written, participants can be anonymous.
And a lot of people believed that.
And the Silk Road certainly thrived on that principle.
But by 2020, I could see that actually, if you could decipher, if you could crack the blockchain, basically, and find patterns in it, then actually you could trace Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, almost all of them, in fact.
In some ways, far more easily than you can trace transactions in the traditional finance system.
And that, in fact, you know, it took me a while to realize this, but years earlier, the small group of detectives, first in the research world and then in the tech industry and then in law enforcement, had figured this out like long before I had and had used cryptocurrency tracing as this kind of incredibly powerful investigative technique to surprise that whole dark web underworld and take down one massive.
Criminal operation after another, and this like escalating spree of busts.
So, you know, that is like how I came.
You know, I did this sort of like strange path from being really fascinated by the potential of the anonymity and untraceability of the dark web to realizing that like that untraceability had this fatal flaw.
And that actually created an even more interesting story, which is the story of this latest book that I've published, Tracers in the Dark.
Now, when Bitcoin first was released, you were still working for Forbes?
Or were you?
Right.
You were still working for Forbes.
Okay.
And when it first came out, I remember you mentioned in your book that you interviewed or you attempted to interview Satoshi Nakamoto, but you interviewed somebody else.
How did that go?
The person that I first found out about Bitcoin from, and this is like back when Bitcoin was worth a dollar.
And I wrote the first print magazine piece about Bitcoin for Forbes.
And I called it, I called the headline of that piece was cryptocurrency.
And I thought that I was clever, even like coming up with that phrase.
It wasn't like a thing anybody had.
Had heard of.
And the first person that I had heard about it from was Gavin Andreessen, who was kind of the, you know, one of the big early Bitcoin developers, had worked closely with Satoshi Nakamoto, but only communicating with him or her, whoever Satoshi is, via email.
I mean, you know, Satoshi's identity remains one of the great mysteries in the history of technology.
Who do you think he really is?
Or is it like a group of people?
Like, if you were to just, if you were to speculate, like, I know you don't know, but if you were to have some, like, Dying guess.
Who would you say it was?
Oh, man.
You know, I have almost like tried to stop thinking about it because I have gone down that particular rabbit hole multiple times.
I once thought that I had found Satoshi when, in fact, I once thought that Satoshi was Hal Finney, the second ever developer of Bitcoin, who actually received the first Bitcoin transactions from Satoshi.
They worked together early on.
Hal Finney, sadly, died of ALS.
Luke Gehrig's disease was paralyzed and passed away around 2014.
But I interviewed him on his deathbed.
He was fully paralyzed, could only communicate with me with his eyebrow movements and with typing through his eye movements, which was very painful and slow.
But he denied being Satoshi, and his family showed me some evidence that he was not.
They showed me some of his communications with Satoshi that would have been quite hard to fake retroactively.
I looked at.
There are other reasons I should say that I came to believe that Hal Finney was not lying to me when he said that he was not Satoshi.
But I thought.
At one point, that I had found Satoshi, then I once thought that I had found him in another guy, Craig Wright, a really wild story that I truly don't want to talk about anymore because he, Craig Wright, I think I don't want to get sued by him as he has sued many people, but I do not believe he is Satoshi.
And in fact, I feel like I fell there for a strange trap that somebody was trying to convince perhaps like investors or somebody that Craig Wright was Satoshi, created a bunch of false documents.
Somebody else unwittingly leaked those documents to me.
Anyway, long, crazy story.
Well, the reason I ask is because if there's anybody on this planet who knows who it is, it's got to be you.
No way.
I mean, well, I would think that if anybody knows, it might be some of the characters in my book who have done these incredible tracing investigations, but I never heard from them that they had figured it out.
I think if anybody knows, it would be the NSA for whom, like, Almost anything digital is like that, you know, that's their territory and they have incredible surveillance powers.
I'm kind of surprised that, like, it hasn't come out.
I mean, not kind of.
I'm there.
It's amazing that it hasn't come out in, you know, more than a decade now.
Even from like some former intelligence person or who knows what.
Like, even intelligence agencies have not been able to figure out who Satoshi is.
That just seems like so uncanny.
I mean, I think sometimes that it had to have been a group because it's just Bitcoin worked so well.
And the smartest hackers that I know kind of would examine it and think that they might have found a vulnerability.
And then, oh, that's a dead end.
Like somebody thought of this ahead of me.
And I heard that enough times that it's just so difficult for one person to create on their own.
But if it were a group, that also just creates a secrecy problem.
I mean, like, I don't know, two.
Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, right?
Exactly.
So, like, I just don't know what to think anymore.
And I've just driven myself crazy enough trying to figure it out that I'm ready to leave that one mystery.
In fact, I kind of appreciate that there is one mystery left in the world, even on the internet, you know?
And I should say that, like Satoshi said in that initial cryptography mailing list email, participants can be anonymous with cryptocurrency.
I think that, like, that has proven to be true, but only for Satoshi himself.
Like, Satoshi has remained anonymous even while amassing a million bitcoins.
Because there was only one transaction, right?
Well, because he received them from mining.
Oh, mining bitcoins.
Okay.
And then never spent any.
He, like, I guess he sent some to people in test transactions, but mostly he just sat on his gigantic multi billion dollar fortune with, like, inhuman restraints, you know?
I think some people even believe Satoshi might be dead himself or herself or themselves because who sits on tens of billions of dollars like that?
But yeah, I mean, but I guess the other half of that point I was trying to make is that everybody else, essentially, who's tried to be anonymous with Bitcoin over the years, practically speaking, has been unmasked at some point, thanks to this surprising trait of cryptocurrency that actually you can trace.
Almost everything that happens on a blockchain.
That was like the real dramatic irony of this whole thing is that cryptocurrency turned out to be this kind of trap, I think, for people seeking financial privacy and for all sorts of criminals who were lured in to this honeypot, essentially, thinking that they could get away with every manner of crime, like dark web drug sales, massive thefts, money laundering, eventually, you know.
The Silk Road Trap00:15:03
The book tells stories of essentially human trafficking or like child sexual exploitation stuff.
And so many of them have been caught on like a gigantic scale, thanks to the fact that the blockchain actually turned out to be this massive collection of evidence of every transaction they ever did, if you know how to kind of crack that code.
Now, some of the stuff that you mention in your book, Tracers in the Dark, which is amazing, by the way, like the story of the Silk Road and the story of Ross Ulbricht and, you know, the, The alpha base story.
A lot of people are familiar with these stories, but I feel like not a lot of people understand how these things went down and how law enforcement was able to track these guys down.
Yeah.
And I feel like that's something that is one of the biggest revelations in your book.
It really does a great job of explaining exactly how this was done.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I mean, for the Silk Road, you know, I had like this weird perspective on it because I interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts before he.
The creator of the Silk Road, who went by the pseudonym, the Dread Pirate Roberts, this like first dark web drug kingpin.
I interviewed him myself before he was caught, before he was identified, and like turned out to be this 29 year old guy, Ross Ulbricht.
Was the guy you interviewed, sorry to interrupt, but when you interviewed Dread Pirate Roberts, are you sure that was Ross or could that have been somebody before him?
It's a fair question.
I think it was Ross.
I think that like, You know, I've turned that question over a lot of times since then.
Of course, when I spoke to the Dread Pirate Roberts, or just didn't speak to him, I said, by the way, I said he was caught in Texas.
He was caught in California, but he's from Texas.
And when I communicated with him, that was over the Silk Road anonymous messaging system.
Just want to be really clear like I was exchanging text messages over the Tor anonymity system with him, basically.
So you never know exactly.
And I got the impression just sometimes, I think I interviewed him for like four or five hours.
And I got, The impression that he was maybe even consulting with somebody as he talked to me, like he would take a while with some answers.
And I know that the Dreadbiter Roberts had this kind of second in command who called himself Variety Jones.
And based on covering his trial, Russell Brick's trial, eventually, Russell Brick's laptop, by the way, was seized with all of his chat records on it.
He tried to, he had full disk encryption on his laptop.
And if he had just been able to close the lid of it, he could have protected all of that evidence, which I think made him kind of overconfident in how much he could store on that laptop.
But the FBI, in this elaborate sting operation in the San Francisco library, grabbed his laptop out of his hands with an undercover agent, got everything.
So you could see his conversations with Variety Jones and all of the other people working for him in his chat logs, which is crazy that he kept those.
And And you could see the Variety Jones at one point suggested this idea like, call yourself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Then, if you're ever caught, you can tell this whole story, you know, like from the Princess Bride, the movie, which where that name comes from, that that's just the kind of rotating handle that, like, it's inherited by one kingpin of the Silk Road after another.
And you can say, like, you acquired it from somebody else who created it and then pretend to be the person who created it, but then sold it.
And then that'll cover your tracks.
I mean, it was.
Really brilliant, honestly, like as cover stories go.
So, you can actually see the Dread Pirate Roberts, probably Ross, I think almost certainly Ross, doing this in my interview with him, where he says, Actually, no, I didn't create the Silk Road.
I bought it from its creator.
And that seemed to be laying the groundwork for the defense he actually would use in his trial, which is that Ross Ulbricht, you know, in court said, I just created the Silk Road as an economic experiment.
Then it was bought.
From me by the dread pirate Roberts.
And like the real criminals who ran the Silk Road and turned it into this giant narcotics, you know, bazaar tricked me in the last minute into coming back and running it again just before I was caught.
You know, it's like it's a bit of an unlikely story.
Not just a bit.
It was a pretty weird defense.
And it kind of fell apart when this was a big surprise at trial.
The prosecution put a guy on the stand who had traced all of the Silk Road's transactions on the blockchain and showed that for it's basically for years, money had been flowing, bitcoins, from the Silk Road server to Ross Ulbricht's laptop.
So he was in charge of it for all of that time, including the time when I, or he at least was like reaping the profits from it all of that time, including when I interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts.
I know a lot of people are really skeptical of these stories.
I have tried to apply as much skepticism as I can as well to this notion that Ross Ulbricht is the Dread Pirate Roberts or the only Dread Pirate Roberts.
A lot of people are particularly skeptical.
I just want to air this out right away about the claim that he had people killed, right?
And say he was never actually charged with that crime in court, which is true.
And that is, he was charged with, you know, This kingpin statute of kind of like a general, you know, running of a massive criminal enterprise and conspiracy and things.
But he was not charged in the case that was actually brought to trial with murder, even though he's accused of like having paid for the killings of one of his employees and like people who he thought threatened the Silk Road and scammed him.
And so I was skeptical of that too.
And I think that in all fairness, that absolutely should have been tried in court given that now he is serving this.
Life sentence, yeah.
He's serving the same sentence as El Chapo, is that right?
I mean, he's it's it's a life sentence, like it's it's the maximum.
I thought it was double life, yes, yes, double life, you know, and uh, may never see the light of day again.
And I think that that is unjust, just to be clear.
I think that's a crazy oversentencing, especially given that he was not actually convicted of murder or attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder or anything.
But the same day that in his trial, which I attended like every minute of it in the Manhattan courtroom, like the same day that the prosecution showed that they could trace the Silk Road cryptocurrency from.
The server to his laptop.
They also showed transactions from his laptop to a would be contract killer for these alleged murders.
And they were timed exactly right.
They were the exact amounts.
You could see his chat logs where he's saying to somebody he thought was a Hell's Angel who was going to do these killings for him, okay, here's the money.
And then you see it on the blockchain.
So I can see those transactions myself.
I don't even have to depend on a source to tell me that.
I can look at the blockchain.
And see that stuff.
That's the power of cryptocurrency tracing.
I mean, it's, and Ross, I'm sure, thought that these transactions were untraceable and anonymous.
And it's the opposite.
Like, I, a journalist, can look at the receipts, basically, you know, on the blockchain.
So, don't you have to know his wallet address, though?
Right.
So, and those did come from the prosecution, to be clear.
But they were, you know, they were aired out, those were shown in court.
The defense had a chance to say, no, those are not his addresses, and they did not, you know.
So, it's like, You have to start doing some really convoluted thinking to imagine that A, Ross was not the Dread Pirate Roberts when I interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts, and B, even that he didn't try to have these people killed.
Like, I am extremely sympathetic.
I'm not extreme.
I guess I would say I'm more sympathetic to Ross Ulbricht than just about any journalist who's covered these stories.
I thought that the Silk Road was an interesting experiment trying to reduce violence in the drug trade, you know, by moving it.
Into this virtual world, basically.
And I thought that Ross was like an interesting, principled person who collected ultimately millions and millions of dollars in drug money and never spent it and really believed in what he was doing as a kind of like political experiment.
He saw himself as a revolutionary who was launching this like idealistic thing on the in a new world, you know, online.
But I think that it's a story about kind of corrupted ideals of how.
Ross, despite his best intentions, was pulled into a situation where he felt like he had to do extremely dark and immoral things to protect the experiment that he had begun.
And that is tragic, but I do believe that Ross did those things, that Ross did run this massive drug trade for better or worse.
Some people, I think, probably still think that that was a good thing.
And then I also think that he actually tried to have people killed, which is hard to defend.
The interesting thing about the Silk Road, too, is the debate was it a good thing or was it a bad thing?
Because obviously, we're talking about laws, it was illegal.
But if you look at the way it worked, you have drug dealers and you have drug buyers, and the drug dealers are reviewed on how good their product is.
And then some of those interviews with the drug dealers on that deep web documentary, they're talking about, like, I wouldn't sell.
I could tell this guy was a newbie or a rookie.
This guy had never bought shit on here before, and he was trying to buy these drugs.
And I know that these drugs are probably way too hard.
For him.
So I said, go do your reading and come back to me when you read it.
It seemed like there was at least some sort of code of ethics within that world.
And people wanted to, you know, you wanted to take care of your reputation and not sell bad drugs.
And it seemed like it was a net good.
Yeah.
You know, it's a super fascinating argument.
I do think that there, you know, some people wanted to describe the Silk Road as like this evil underworld where there was no good.
That is definitely incorrect.
You know, people describe that there was child abuse on the, Silk Road, there was not.
See, people said there was contract killing for sale on the Silk Road, which is not even true.
Ross had to like go find his own contract killers if that's what he did.
So, but to say that it's a net good is really difficult to say.
Like, I just don't.
I can see the good.
I can see how, like, it's, you know, for instance, there cannot be any violence in the drug trade.
You can't get scammed.
You can't be, you can't even be sold as easily like fake drugs or.
Laced, whatever, stamped on, whatever, because there's reviews and ratings.
As you said, I mean, it was, it is an amazing thing.
If I was going to buy ecstasy like today, I would buy it on the dark web because I've been told that there's like fentanyl in everything, like all sorts of things when you buy them, whatever, in like the bathroom of some club.
Exactly.
So, like the Silk Road invented this new model of sales that was really smart and accountable on both sides to the buyer and the seller.
It also made really hard, dangerous drugs available to people who otherwise would not have had them.
I think in some cases, I, as I said, sat in the trial.
I heard the parents of people talk about their kids, adult kids and young kids too, who overdosed on opioids and things that were bought from the Silk Road.
Some guy who had kicked the habit, he'd moved somewhere farther away from a major city where he didn't think he would be tempted as much.
But then he learned about the Silk Road and he saw that, like, it's still possible to scratch that itch and overdosed and died.
You know, I actually don't think that, like, it's more the, I think, a better argument.
I don't really want to, like, defend the judge in this case who gave him this draconian, crazy double life sentence.
But she, in that sentencing hearing, also, like, read this very long statement explaining her sentence.
And I thought it was.
Really smart at points.
She said, Yes, you, Ross, you did reduce the violence in like one part of the drug trade, which is like the retail part, like the buyer and the ultimate seller and the ultimate buyer, you know, at the very end of that supply chain, basically.
But if you go further up the supply chain, that's where the real violence is happening in Mexico, in like Afghanistan, or wherever these drugs are produced.
And by expanding the market, By finding a new way for people to sell billions of dollars worth of drugs, you actually cut out the violence in one part, but you expanded it overall and you did nothing about the violence further up the supply chain.
So you probably have added, in terms of net harm to the world.
And I think that that's a compelling idea that by finding a new way to expand just the total volume of drug sales, maybe you have, and of course, the people selling on the dark web have to have a supplier.
Maybe you have actually caused harm.
And Ross, I think that the answer, of course, is like, well, we should legalize all these drugs.
I am pretty sympathetic to those sorts of arguments.
Ross actually told me in our interview, or rather, the Dread Pirate Roberts did, that he didn't believe in drug legalization.
And that is only just like a new way for the state to control these things, to tax them.
And as a sort of libertarian he was, he didn't even want to see drugs legalized.
He wanted, Just the black market underworld to expand and take over everything, you know?
Inside the Onion Router00:06:24
So, like lawlessness.
Exactly.
Like total crypto anarchy, as cypherpunks call it.
Wow.
You know, the thing about Ross's story is most people I talk to, they just think of him as this Dalai Lama type character.
You know, like he's just this big, you know, idealistic savior of the world.
It's fascinating that that's who you talk to.
Because, you know, like I would say that most of, America, most of the media, not to like, you know, cast dispersions on my colleagues, like think of the Silk Road as like, you know, drugs, death, the dark web.
Like those are the headlines you see on like the cover of magazines about the Silk Road when at the time that Ross was arrested.
So, you know, it's interesting.
I've tried to just like sort of maintain my like mental independence on this and not be pulled into either direction.
I mean, you saw Deep Web where I was like, Uh, made by my friend Alex Winter, who was, I think, really sympathetic to Ross.
Yeah, and oh, yeah, you can tell at the end of that with the interviews of him and everything, yeah, at the end of the documentary.
And I'm like, I think I'm you know, a degree or two more like in the middle, uh, or like whatever.
Uh, just I feel like I you got to look at what the Silk Road was, warts and all, and it was fascinating.
It did come a place from a place of ideals, um, but those ideals were corrupted to some degree and like.
Bad things happened.
And as they will, like in that world of narcotic sales.
I mean, that's, I think of it also as kind of like the, I don't know, like the third season of The Wire, like Amsterdam, you know, like Amsterdam was an interesting, maybe I'm like losing it.
I've never seen The Wire.
Okay.
Yeah.
Whatever.
But it was this basically like, you know, a part of Baltimore in this story was like carved out and drugs were basically de facto legalized.
And the result was that like the rest of Baltimore, like crime dropped hugely.
But People overdosed and died.
And that was like in Amsterdam, this one little neighborhood was a hellish place.
And I think that is in some ways like a very rough analogy of what the dark web or what Silk Road might have become if it was allowed to flourish.
Right.
I guess the question is the two main things are, people can choose to take some sort of crazy illicit drug and kill themselves by taking too much, or becoming addicted, or falling down the falling down the rabbit hole, and or, on the other hand, you have, you know, people taking where they don't know what it is and it's laced with stuff and you don't know what the product you're getting is.
Absolutely, I mean, I think that seems like the more dangerous.
Yeah, I mean I think that the consumer experience of the dark web is way superior.
Yeah, I mean, like I have um I, I bought I, I like for a Forbes article, like even I bought drugs on the Silk Road And, like, it's an incredible experience.
It was like amazing at the time, anyway.
And, you know, people say, like, oh, is it cheaper?
No, it's actually more expensive.
But the premium that you paid was for the reviews and the ratings and this assurance that, like, you're getting what you pay for.
How did that work?
What was that process like buying it?
Like, you got to get in through the onion router, through Tor, and then you have to.
How did the.
Can you explain the process of what it was like?
And what kind of drugs did you buy?
Well, I won't talk about what drugs in total I've bought in the dark with.
But for Forbes, I mean, this is bizarre that Forbes let me do this.
And they actually, I was going to do it as a sidebar in print in the magazine.
And they were like, we can't publish that in the magazine.
Like, 65 year old men read Forbes magazine.
Like, we'll put it online.
But I just bought like a gram of marijuana each from three different, the Silk Road and two of its kind of copycat competitors at the time, just to show that what was possible.
I mean, this was 2013 when that was, because that seemed pretty like interesting and edgy.
I mean, people were like, had never heard of this stuff.
So you would, yeah, you would like buy Bitcoins.
I bought them from Coinbase, which was like kind of the easiest way to, the easiest exchange to use at that time.
A coin, I can't remember.
God, I mean, I think by 2013 it was like getting up into the hundreds.
Eventually, it would hit like over a thousand that year before this first big crash, or not the first crash, you know.
Um, but uh, yeah, and uh, then you fire up Tor, the Tor browser, as you said, you like get onto Silk Road, and I think that you could probably search the clear net, as they say, like the normal web to find the URLs, which are these like long, um, convoluted uh, URLs that end in dot onion.
Because these are like Tor hidden services, is what they were called at the time, which is like a website that runs on this anonymity software, Tor.
You run Tor, they run Tor.
You both kind of like put on, I mean, like the analogy is you put on like a blindfold, you get like put into a van and like driven to a place where you can't be followed, you don't know where you are, and you like meet in the middle so that nobody knows like where the server is hosted, nobody knows where you are.
It's completely anonymous on both ends.
That's how the dark web works, basically.
I mean, I guess like the real technology is that your web traffic is basically triple encrypted in three layers.
And then it's kind of like bounced through three different computers run by volunteers in the Tor network around the world.
Each of those computers can strip away like one layer of encryption, but not the others, so that they can only see one step ahead.
They can't like see around those blind corners to the next computer.
And so, you know, after three hops, nobody can trace you from your origin to your destination.
And the server on the other side does the same thing.
They also triple, you know, wrap there.
The Tor stands for the onion router.
So it's like this is called onion routing because it's in layers, you know.
And that's how it works.
Like you meet in the middle, nobody can trace each other.
Carl Mark Force's Undercover Work00:15:28
And you like pay for your drugs and it goes into an escrow, which is very clever.
The escrow is not released until you've got your stuff and you like finalize.
You say, like, okay, got my package.
It was here's a rating, here's a review.
I release the escrow and the seller gets their money.
That's one of the most sophisticated parts of it because the price of Bitcoin is so volatile and it had this escrow feature where.
And not only that, but like, I mean, the Dread Pirate Roberts, like, would cover, he created like a feature where he would cover any like changes in the price due to volatility because dealers didn't like how volatile Bitcoin was.
So, like, while the money was sitting in escrow, if it went up or down, he would like, Cover the difference, which is just like such a smart financial innovation.
Because, you know, drug dealers are not trying to gamble or, you know, do speculative investment with their bitcoins that are sitting in escrow.
They just want their money.
So, like, that's, I mean, you have to give credit to where it's due.
The Silk Road was an amazing invention.
I think, like, few people kind of realize how smart it was as a kind of financial innovation.
Not just like the combining Tor and Bitcoin, which were kind of the two big ingredients, but like the whole thing was just so beautifully designed.
And it launched, you know, I think hopefully we'll get into like, A whole world of follow ons, copycats, innovation, evolution of this dark web drug kingpins that followed in Ross's footsteps.
Yeah.
So this book, it seems like it's not just something that you just decided to start on one day.
This book seems like it's been part of your entire career.
It's just sort of like a summary of everything you've been following since the inception of Bitcoin.
Well, I didn't intend to ever, in fact, actually around 2014, I was like trying to.
Write a book just about the Silk Road and how crazy that story was, and how at the time I thought that that book was going to be about how cryptocurrency is unlocking a new world of crypto anarchy and cybercrime.
And I couldn't sell that book, luckily.
I think because there had been too much coverage of the Silk Road, too many other people writing their books.
Nick Bilton's book about the Silk Road is fantastic.
But I'm lucky in a way that I did not write that book because.
As I said, like about, you know, seven, let's see, like six years after that, 2020 or so, I started to see.
I mean, of course, I knew that Bitcoins could be traced to some degree.
Like I covered this really closely.
I thought, I think everybody who was in that smart, like crypto cryptography world sort of could see that, yes, like, oh, Bitcoin is not actually as anonymous as it's supposed to be from the beginning.
But it sort of seemed like if you were careful, if you never revealed your Bitcoin addresses publicly, If you put your transactions through, like, you know, a few hops of like moving it from one address to another to another before you spent it, if you used laundry services, all these tricks, it seemed like you could make it pretty untraceable, pretty private.
Only in 2020 did I start to see the Department of Justice start crediting in their kind of announcements of major takedowns and busts and indictments this one company.
And they would thank Chainalysis.
This one cryptocurrency tracing firm.
Just the fact that there was a cryptocurrency tracing company was, I sort of knew about that, but I was like, oh, they're actually really active.
They're kind of like, they kind of had their hands in a ton of these cases.
So were they, was Chainalysis their sole premise just to work with the government and to help them trace this criminal activity?
Or did they have some sort of other utility in the marketplace?
Well, the founder of Chainalysis is a fascinating guy.
I mean, there's a few founders, but the original guy who, Came up with the idea of a company, Michael Groninger, this Danish.
He's a fan of Bitcoin and he believed in Bitcoin.
But from the very beginning, he was like, no, this is not anonymous or untraceable.
There's a whole blockchain here.
The blockchain is, by definition, a list of every transaction, every Bitcoin transaction ever.
It's just between addresses rather than any identity.
So these long, convoluted Bitcoin addresses.
Don't look like they have anything to do with an identity in the real world.
But he, and actually, he based a lot of his first software on the tricks that had been published by Sarah Micklejohn, this researcher at the University of California, San Diego.
He saw that you could find patterns.
He, rather, you know, Sarah found, and he like kind of took this further.
You could find patterns in the blockchain.
And then he built a piece of software that could essentially like implement these tricks to create clusters to show that like sometimes.
Thousands or even millions of addresses belonged to one person or service, then to follow that money, sometimes until it hit a cryptocurrency exchange where, you know, cryptocurrency exchanges where you trade Bitcoins for dollars or vice versa, they have know your customer requirements under US law.
They have to have identity, identifying information for their accounts.
But his idea in creating the first tool to trace cryptocurrency, which he called Reactor, was that he would sell this to exchanges, to like Bitcoin exchanges.
He'd worked, he had helped to found another exchange.
He was the CTO there, I think.
And he left to create Chanalysis in the hopes of helping exchanges just know who their customers are, like help them understand, like help them deal with these know your customer requirements, I think, in a kind of more automated way.
Like, you probably want to know if you're an exchange, if you're helping to cash out dark web drug money.
Right.
You know, at least, like, you may not want to know, but, like, if the government is demanding that you know, this is an easy way to do it.
So, That was his first idea to pitch it to exchanges, and eventually, a lot of them did buy it.
But his first customers, to his surprise, were law enforcement agencies.
Wow.
And he actually was just in San Francisco and was pitching this to exchanges.
And then a friend was like, Oh, you should talk to this prosecutor who introduced him to this agent within IRS criminal investigations in San Francisco named Tigreen Gumbarian, who was in some ways the central detective of.
Of the book, he was Tigran, was the guy who came from the Soviet Union, yeah.
He grew up in Armenia, but then in post Soviet Russia as well.
Um, had like a very tough childhood there.
I mean, like he truly was war torn Armenia, right?
Um, and it's a very interesting character.
Like, IRS criminal investigations is a weird place, like, yeah, I don't think most Americans know about it even, but it's like this actual law enforcement agency within IRS.
Um, and they, you know, I mean.
They kind of have a chip on their shoulder about the fact that people don't even know this, but they carry guns, they make arrests, they carry out search warrants, they travel around the world and get people extradited to be prosecuted in the United States and stuff.
They are a full blown law enforcement agency, but get no respect from the FBI and DEA or whoever.
Tigran was a forensic accountant who carried a gun and was kind of this weird mix of nerd and tough guy.
Who also had looked at Bitcoin from the beginning and saw him also like, there's this blockchain here.
I don't believe this can be anonymous.
I can see these transactions.
And, you know, his first, he was actually the first to ever show that it was possible to trace Bitcoin within law enforcement.
And this was not in the Silk Road case in the traditional sense, but actually in the wake of the bust of Ross Ulbricht, which did not actually use cryptocurrency tracing.
He was identified through other mistakes he'd made.
Tigran Gambarian basically sat down, looked at the blockchain, and showed that a DEA agent and a Secret Service agent who were involved in the investigation of the Silk Road had stolen money from the Silk Road as corrupt cops, basically.
Actually, one of them had sold law enforcement information to the Dread Pirate Roberts.
One of them had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin from the Silk Road.
But these were two federal agents who, in their own investigation of the Silk Road, Had thought that they could use the false promise of this fake idea that Bitcoin is untraceable, that they could just take any money they wanted to, that they could lay their hands on from the Silk Road and get away with it.
And Tigran was the one, Tigran at IRS Criminal Investigations was the one who sat down and showed, no, look, I can see that Karl Mark Force, this DEA agent, is receiving money from the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Right.
You know, like nobody thought that that was possible in 2014 when he did this.
Now, is Karl Mark Force, is that one of the guys who set him up with one of the first murder for hires?
Exactly.
I mean, that's this is such a bizarre story.
But yes, like Carl Mark Force had gone undercover on the Silk Road, had basically like pulled off this kind of amazing thing.
He was not actually working with the New York group of FBI agents who would eventually take down the Silk Road.
He was part of this Baltimore task force.
And they, you know, using him as an undercover agent, did this crazy thing where they set it up where Ross would have a shipment of cocaine sent to one of his employees.
And Curtis Clark Green is his name.
He was his grandpa in Utah.
I mean, it's bizarre.
And then have him arrested.
They had him arrested when he received the cocaine shipment and then essentially flipped him.
And like Ross, understanding that his employee had then been arrested, was like, okay, I guess we got to have this guy killed.
And you can even see in the chat.
Logs with Variety Jones, his sort of second in command, where he kind of reluctantly comes to this decision and orders Carl Mark Force as an undercover agent, under his undercover identity, who is, you know, at this point, like very close with the Dread Pirate Roberts.
He orders Carl, he asks rather, Carl Mark Force to have his employee killed.
So it's actually Carl Mark Force as an undercover who is asked to.
Kill Curtis Clark Green, right?
Bizarrely.
And so they stage his murder for the benefit of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
They like take fake photos of him being tortured and killed, and they use like Campbell's soup to show the blood coming out of his mouth.
So, one of the big things, one of the most interesting things to me about how they were able to manipulate the Silk Road was these federal agents were able to, so they were raiding these users home.
They were like somehow raiding the people who were users on the Silk Road.
Taking all their shit, taking over all their shit and not arresting them because if they arrested them, that would sort of tip off Dread Pirate Roberts that they could have flipped.
So they would purposely not arrest these guys who are working or a part of the Silk Road.
However, they would take over their identities on the Silk Road.
Is that right?
I think that they managed this with the.
Actually, the other group, the New York group, managed this with one other of the Silk Road employees, a woman actually, who, Homeland Security investigations agents working in that New York group, did somehow identify a Silk Road staffer, convinced her, rather than to avoid prosecution, to give him her account.
And then he became an undercover operative, like working with the Dread Pirate Roberts.
He never.
Became aware of that.
That was just like a successful kind of infiltration of the Silk Road that was used up until the very moment of Ross Ulbricht's arrest.
That undercover agent was communicating with the Dread Pirate Roberts and telling him, hey, can you log on to check out something?
And then he logged on at the moment that the FBI was there with undercover agents ready to arrest him so that they could make sure his laptop was open.
So, yeah, there were so many different things happening.
The whole Baltimore thing turned out to be like a total.
You know, failed investigation.
The Baltimore, all of that stuff with the fake murder, everything was, didn't really get them any closer to identifying the Dread Pirate Roberts.
So, going back real quick to when Karl Mark Force was talking to Dread Pirate Roberts about Curtis Green, is that his name?
Yeah.
And Dread Pirate Roberts basically said, you know, we need to kill this guy.
Was Karl Mark Force sort of like inciting him or like pushing him down that path?
Like, ooh, you got to be aware of this guy.
You got to figure out what to do with this guy.
Or was it just, Did it all come, you know, it?
He was not from what I can see in reading all of the conversations.
It was really Variety Jones who was, oh, um, his second in command.
Ross was kind of like, I don't know, like, I've never had anybody killed before.
I mean, the Dread Pirate Roberts, you can see this in his, and Variety Jones is the one saying, like, you know, uh, if this were the Wild West, like, this would be a hanging offense, you know.
He's like, honestly, if you can't do this, I'm not sure we can continue to work together.
He's really pressuring him, and then amazingly, he turns to.
An undercover agent to get it done.
In fact, the same undercover agent who arranged the whole situation.
I mean, it is like Shakespearean coincidence.
It's bizarre.
Yeah.
But this is like, you know, all just, I just want to be clear.
Like, this story is told in American Kingpin.
This is like a crazy story.
The story of the Silk Road is insane.
I almost found it like difficult to get through it so that I could start to tell the new stuff, which is that after all of that happened, that's when Tigran Gumbarian showed that this.
Bizarre Baltimore investigation was corrupt as hell.
And the way that he did that was by tracing bitcoins, which was not something that anybody had ever done before.
And this has not really been highlighted in the Silk Road story that is how these corrupt agents were found.
They too, like Ross Ulbricht, fell for, they were seduced by this false promise of Bitcoin's anonymity.
And not one, but two of these Baltimore agents independently, they didn't even know about each other, were trying to skim hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their work.
They both went to prison.
Tracing Mt. Gox's Missing Millions00:15:08
That was in some sense like the beginning of this new era of cryptocurrency tracing, like as this golden age of law enforcement investigation on the dark web.
And what year did this happen?
What year did this happen?
So that was 2014, the same year that Chainalysis was founded by Michael Groninger.
And then Michael Groninger and Tigran meet in San Francisco and they become this kind of odd couple.
Chainalysis, in fact, and IRS criminal investigations become this partnership that uses cryptocurrency tracing to just like carry it, you know, just go on a.
Spree, like a bonanza of busts and takedowns over the years that follow, and like solving many of the biggest kind of unsolved cases in the dark web and just like racking up a huge number of arrests.
Yeah, it's like what you were explaining.
What was the woman's name again?
Who had shit a warehouse and she was buying all this stuff from the Silk Road.
Yeah, Sarah Micklejohn.
Sarah Micklejohn.
Yeah, she was doing like this, like almost just taking these millions and millions of wallet addresses and just like using patterns.
To sort of like place them in certain buckets and figure out which ones go where.
And how is she like, what was her big revelation?
What was her sort of value to?
Yeah.
So, like, this, I don't know, we're like rewinding about a year now, flashing back.
So, like, 2013 is when Sarah Micklejohn at UCSD was like, hmm, you know, she was a brilliant cryptography researcher, but she had not really looked at cryptocurrency.
And she was like, you know, I wonder if this stuff is as anonymous as people.
Think it is.
And she took almost like this anthropological approach.
Like, I wonder if I can just figure out what people are doing with cryptocurrency.
Maybe I can just figure out how many people even are using it, which nobody knew really.
And she was the one who came up with these clustering techniques, basically, like a few clever tricks to show that certain addresses all must belong to the same person or organization.
Like, one is if to spend Bitcoins from an address, I don't know if you want to get into these nerdy details, you tell me when to stop.
But like, To spend bitcoins from a bitcoin address, you have to have the private key for that address.
And so, if you create a multi input transaction, as it's called, which sounds complicated, but it's really just like sending bitcoins from lots of addresses at once in one transaction, then you must control the private keys for all those addresses.
That means you look at that multi input transaction and you say, oh, all these addresses must have belonged to one person or to one service.
And if you then take that, Sort of like lens and like look at the whole blockchain for every multi input transaction, you can immediately start to create clusters that show.
Oh, I think like she showed like right away there are there are maximum half as many people here or services as there are Bitcoin addresses.
She like cut the whole blockchain in half, right?
And it's complex, an algorithm to exactly, yeah.
And then like that's that's that was trick number one, kind of like an easy one.
Then she came up with her own, like that.
In fact, that was something that was kind of like an open secret in the crypto world, uh, already at that point.
But then she came up with another one, which is like that when you spend bitcoins with many wallets, you basically cannot spend a fraction of the coins in an address.
You kind of like crack open the piggy bank, like the whole piggy bank of that address, and you send all the coins to whoever you intend to receive part of them.
And then you get back change at a different address.
And that can make it really difficult to follow the money because you don't know which is the recipient address and which is the change address.
But she realized, oh, well, the change address very often is recognizable because it's the new address, the one that was just like created to receive the change.
The recipient address sometimes has been used before or it's old.
So, you know, with that algorithm, that like little trick, she applied that across the blockchain and then could find, like, oh, I can see, like, here's like a fork in the road where everybody else didn't know how to follow the money, but I can follow it.
I can follow it to the change address.
And that still belongs to the first person sending the money.
That's his address.
In fact, all of these change addresses are his address.
I can sort of like follow this wad of cash as it, like, as bills are peeled off and handed to somebody, and it keeps getting like taken back by the spender and put in a different pocket, but it's the same wad of bills, you know?
And then eventually you see that that wad of bills like sent to a cryptocurrency exchange to be cashed out.
And there you can send a subpoena.
She knows like the law enforcement agency can send a subpoena to that exchange and identify somebody.
So, like, already she's like building like powerful tricks to, Follow the money and identify people that were not, you know, previously obvious to anybody in this world.
And then she also, as you said, started doing these undercover transactions basically, where, you know, she would put money into the Silk Road and take it out again.
She never actually bought anything on the Silk Road, she says, but like she could have, obviously.
And doing those undercover deals, she can see which addresses she's interacting with.
And every time she does that, she can sometimes like say, oh, this address belongs to the Silk Road.
It's part of this big cluster.
So, that whole cluster is the Silk Road.
Now I've identified like a million Silk Road addresses, and I can see everybody interacting with them.
Each one of those is a drug deal.
You know, that is so powerful.
And it was the first like real, like massive hole blown in this myth of Bitcoin's anonymity.
That paper came out in late 2013.
Tigring and Berrian read it before he traced these two corrupt agents' money.
Michael Groninger read it before he built.
A tool that like automated all these tricks, you know, and started selling that to law enforcement.
So that's like the true kind of like, you know, aha moment.
Right.
Like this is possible.
And then soon Chainalysis was the one that really built it into a company.
I mean, it's very interesting, I think, to see that Sarah Micklejohn did not like become a professional cryptocurrency tracer or work with law enforcement.
And that in part came out of her ambivalence about the like morality of this or like, Is it really a good thing that cryptocurrency can be traced?
She saw it as financial surveillance.
And she, I think, in a really legitimate way, believes that there are good uses of financial privacy, that that is important.
Cryptocurrency was meant to be an antidote to financial surveillance in the traditional finance world, where every credit card transaction you ever make is extremely transparent to companies and governments who want to get that data.
For Groninger, there was obviously.
Money involved.
Yeah.
So you asked me too about like Groninger's motivations, but I never quite like spelled it out.
He saw it really differently.
He was like, well, no, cryptocurrency was never meant to be private.
You can look at like this whole blockchain.
Like nobody could have ever had like any idea that it was private, which I think is not exactly right.
I think Satoshi did think that it was meant that it could have had privacy properties that were important.
But he was like, this whole idea that it was anonymous, you can, it was just not there in the technology from the beginning.
And the great thing about cryptocurrency.
According to Michael Groninger, it's transparent and you can see everything.
And that's what's going to make this great.
And we're going to, like, you know, kind of fuel that.
We're going to show how transparent it is by selling this tool that will allow anybody to trace, not anybody, but his customers to trace cryptocurrency transactions.
And we're going to clean up the wild west of the crypto world and make it legitimate and, you know, respectable and legal.
That's how chain analysis sees these things.
So, when Groninger started first working with Gumbarian, what was sort of the first big case they started working on trying to crack?
So, Groninger, before even meeting Tigran Gumbarian, had taken on this first case for tree analysis, kind of pro bono, on behalf of Mt. Gox, or actually the bankruptcy trustees of Mt. Gox.
So, for people that don't know, can you explain what Mt. Gox was?
Yeah, Mt. Gox was the first Bitcoin exchange.
For a long time, it was the only one.
And, like, I tried to buy like $40 worth of Bitcoins from Mt. Gox when Bitcoin was worth a dollar.
Like, when I was, you know, working on my story about Bitcoin for Forbes, and it was like buggy and the transaction did not go through.
And I, like, gave up and I, you know, probably lost millions and millions of dollars by not buying those Bitcoins at a dollar.
But Mt. Gox, you know, as buggy as it was and it was kind of like always considered a little janky, it was the only way to buy and sell Bitcoins for years.
Wasn't there a big, like, criminal conspiracy that went down?
There's a guy who lives like two hours south of here.
Who was like largely involved with Mt. Gox and he went to prison.
There was a big investigation.
What the hell is his name?
He has a podcast.
I don't know.
I'm trying to think of who that could possibly be.
He's got glasses.
Fuck, he lives in Sarasota.
Is it the original creator?
I don't know.
I don't want to like say, what the fuck?
Take a guess at who went to prison.
I got to look it up.
I got to look it up.
I know you know who this guy is.
Charlie Shrem.
Oh, Shrem.
Yeah, of course.
Charlie Shrem.
Yeah.
Wasn't he involved with Mt. Gox?
I don't think he was.
He was.
He, yeah, Charlie Schrem.
Yes.
This is an interesting guy.
I met Charlie in New York like around the time I started covering Bitcoin.
And he was a really nice guy.
I can't remember what his first company was.
I think it was like a payment processor or something for cryptocurrency.
It turned out, you know, I don't know the details of his case that well, but I think he was essentially, he was accused, I think, of, Working with the Silk Road to launder money, basically.
I think that's what he went down for, but he's out of prison.
Yeah.
You know, I didn't cover Charlie's case, I can't remember the details of his case that well.
I did cover it, some of it, but it's been years.
I don't know what it is, I don't remember the details either.
All I just remember, I remember him being associated with Mt. Gox somehow.
Well, everybody was kind of.
I mean, Mt. Gox was like the only game in town for years, it was the only way to get cryptocurrency.
And I remember, I actually was going to like write a, I wanted to write like a big feature about Mt. Gox for Forbes.
Like, look at this, you know, look at this massive business at the center of Bitcoin.
And people warned me, like, don't do that.
This place doesn't, this place is shady.
It's not going well.
Like, they just don't know what they're doing.
And then in 2014, sure enough, like Mt. Gox went bankrupt.
Like, suddenly just had lost everybody's Bitcoins, just froze all withdrawals.
And they said that they had been hacked.
A lot of people didn't believe them.
A lot of people thought, like, oh, the, Mark Carpellis, this kind of weird, eccentric French CEO living in Japan, had stolen all the money.
That's what people thought.
And Michael Groninger agreed to take on the case on behalf of the bankruptcy trustees in Japan for Mt. Gox and figure out where all of the missing Mt. Gox money had gone through cryptocurrency tracing.
And this was like half a billion dollars of Bitcoin at the time.
I mean, much more now.
And He basically, just to cut the story short, he traced that money to another Bitcoin exchange.
He showed that it had been stolen by hackers, essentially, and that it had not been embezzled by Mt. Gox's own staff.
He actually showed that it seemed to have been taken by people in Russia's time zone, was his first clue.
And then it had been cashed out through another cryptocurrency exchange, like a newer one called BTCE, that had by that point this reputation as a kind of black hole of money laundering.
Mt. Gox would follow anti money laundering laws.
Like you have to get people's identifying information to cash out their money.
BTCE was this mysterious exchange hosted like nobody knew where, by whom.
And it had no know your customer anti money laundering requirements.
So it had become like this magnet for all kinds of criminal cryptocurrency, including it turns out it had cashed out, it had been used to launder the half billion dollars of stolen Mt. Gox money Michael Groninger showed.
At the same time, Tigring Gumbarian was investigating BTCE because it looked shady, shady as hell.
And he had taken on that case.
And so their cases kind of converged again in this bizarre way.
And it turned out Tigring, through other investigative means, not cryptocurrency tracing, but more traditional law enforcement stuff, tracing IP addresses and seizing the BTCE server, which turned out to be in Virginia, was able to show that.
The same person cashing out all those Mt. Gox coins into BTCE was also one of the creators of BTCE.
That in fact, BTCE had been created, this whole cryptocurrency exchange had been created just as a way to launder the loot from this giant heist of Mt. Gox.
And then once the creators of BTCE had created this kind of trading platform to launder this half billion dollars, they were kind of like, well, we might as well keep it running.
This is actually a profitable business.
And BTCE became like, you know, Started laundering all of these other kinds of cryptocurrency from criminals around the world.
But it was all the same.
It was like BTCE, the creator of BTCE, one of them, and the sort of money man for the Mt. Gox hacking operation were one guy, and they showed that it was this Russian man, Alexander Vinik.
And they had to keep that secret for years, but he eventually went on vacation in Greece, was arrested, served prison time in France, has now been extradited to the US.
And he is facing trial here.
So I should say, like, I guess he's innocent until proven guilty on some of these charges, but he was convicted of money laundering in France.
So, but that was like the first major case where they solved this biggest mystery in cryptocurrency at the time, like this missing half billion dollars.
They basically vindicated the CEO of Mt. Gox, who was thought to have taken that money.
The Alpha02 Exit Scam00:14:44
They showed that it really was a Russian hacker who'd taken it, more or less.
And they took down BTCE, which turned out to be kind of this.
Treasure trove of tracing, also because once you have that server, that would be like they later turned out to be this wealth of information about who was cashing out money.
They could get sometimes IP addresses and things from that server and, and like learn about some of the people who thought that they were anonymously cashing out stuff through this completely like black market exchange.
Um, but that was kind of the beginning of this like golden age of cryptocurrency tracing where IRS criminal investigations and chain analysis.
And eventually, DEA, FBI, everybody has used this massive, like, once kind of secret technique to as a super weapon to just like go after the biggest criminals on the dark web and in that whole world of like the internet's underground, basically.
So, Vinick was a Russian guy.
What is so wild is he got is he the guy who was a former credit card scammer too?
I've been told that like he has a past that he was sort of known.
You know, I didn't want to like.
I guess I this is all a little thin because I have only heard it from like a couple people and I don't see it in court records or anything.
Um, but he is sort of he, I was told, you know, allegedly, I guess he had a history as a credit card fraud money man, like the one who would do the laundering once you, um, who would help you cash out basically.
And and so I think you might be thinking though of Alexander Kaz, who was like the real credit card fraudster who becomes like a massive, like, dark web kingpin.
Yeah, we can get to that.
Yes.
Yeah.
No, because I've had a credit card scammer on here before, and he was telling me when he was in his peak of buying these credit cards and manufacturing these fake, phony credit cards and basically uploading people's money onto them.
He said that everyone he was doing business with was in Ukraine.
Yeah, I have no doubt.
And Ukraine is like a hotbed for this kind of stuff.
I think that Ukraine is not like a great place to do this stuff anymore because Ukraine has, I mean, Ukraine has corruption problems, and there's no doubt, but like Ukraine has become, you know, it's sort of shifted its alliances and is more cooperative with Western law enforcement than maybe used to be.
Now, Russia, but I mean, not now, but Russia remains behind a kind of like I was going to say iron curtain.
It feels like rude to kind of like anachronistic to say that, but like there is like a barrier though.
Like you can get away with so many kinds of cyber crime, ransomware, like dark web.
Drug, whatever, dark web, cybercrime of all kinds, like beyond that border with total impunity.
That's what Alexander Vinick from inside Russia's border.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
But Alexander Vinick made the mistake of traveling, you know, to Greece.
And like these kind of undercover agents closed in on him on this beautiful Greek beach and arrested him.
And like that, and that, yeah, was like a rare instance when one of these like massive, Criminals of the Russian underworld was actually like laid hands on.
I think I'm sure that they're like, uh, these stories kind of resonate within that world and they're learning, like, do not go on vacation to Greece, you know?
Yeah.
Um, but yeah, like, uh, should we get into Alexander Kaz then?
Like, yeah.
So explain it, people.
Like, when did Alpha Bay first come on the map and what was Alpha Bay?
Was it basically just a reaction to Silk Road going down?
Or was it like, it was obviously way bigger than Silk Road, but was it essentially the same thing?
Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
We had the whole conversation about like the ideals of the Silk Road.
And, you know, and in fact, like when the judge in Ross Ulbricht's case sentenced him to life, double life in prison, she was trying to send a message like, don't follow in this guy's footsteps.
That did not work.
Like, in fact, it just brought more attention to the Silk Road and, you know, created more copycats.
And then, like, subsequently, like, there was just this power vacuum that was filled by one.
Dark web market after another, each kind of like vying for supremacy.
But then, and a lot of them would just like, were, you know, scammers.
They would just like get big enough and then steal everybody's money and run away.
That happened.
That's called an exit scam.
It happened like a couple of times.
Some of them just disappeared.
A couple of them were taken down by law enforcement because they made like dumb mistakes.
But then, yes, like Alphabet came on the scene and did not go away.
It launched in 2014, but by like 2016, it was not only the biggest dark web market, but the biggest dark web market in history.
It had like surpassed the peak of any previous market.
And part of it's a.
Part of what made it kind of like stick in that way was that its founder, this mysterious kingpin named Alpha02, went by Alpha02, was, as you said, a credit card fraudster, a known credit card fraudster with a reputation who had like sold a guide to credit card fraud even online.
And so AlphaBay initially just sold credit card hacking tools, stolen credit card information.
It was like a cybercrime.
But then Alpha O2 sort of innovation was to combine that with the narcotics dark web, which is actually much more profitable.
And so Alpha Bay became this one stop shop for stolen hacking tools.
Sorry, stolen hacked information, hacking tools.
You could search for very specific stolen credit cards in your area to better defraud people or whatever.
And then it also had heroin and fentanyl and everything imaginable on the drug side.
And it did grow eventually to be 10 times the size of the Silk Road.
And Alpha 02 was like this kind of mysterious and seemingly untouchable kingpin of this growing dark web market.
Do you have a public persona like Dread Power Roberts did or this mystique about him?
Yeah, this is what was interesting.
He first of all had no ideals, it was pretty clear.
He was a criminal who just wanted to make as much money as possible through Alpha Bay.
And as soon as Alpha Bay started to become giant, he kind of like, instead of like the way that, you know, the Dread Pirate Roberts behaved was like he was this political leader of a movement.
He would post these manifestos and love letters and he did an interview with me and like, you know, and he had like a Dread Pirate Roberts book club where he would read about like Austrian libertarian economics and stuff.
And this guy looked like a real gangster.
And this guy, yeah, he just like, once he was making millions and millions, he just slipped into the shadows.
He actually changed his name.
From Alpha 02 to just admin, he said, I'm not gonna, I will no longer be like communicating with customers or sellers on Alpha Bay.
You can talk to my right hand man, you know, who is D Snake, which is like extremely, to me, that's like a real criminal.
That's like somebody who is smart and just motivated by survival and money.
Completely take ego out of it, right?
Yeah, exactly.
It turned out he was kind of like getting his like ego outlet elsewhere.
We can talk about that in a minute.
But like, And also, he would sign off his messages before he disappeared, basically, with Russian language.
Like, he would write, be safe brothers in Russian at the end of his messages.
There were rules for Alpha Bay.
I mean, there were very few rules.
There were none of the Silk Roads rules about only victimless crime, that kind of thing.
But there was one rule that you could only sell hacked information if it didn't come from Russians or former Soviet countries.
So, it seemed like it was this tradition.
Like, this is very common with Russian cyber criminals.
There are rules to prevent Russian law enforcement from coming after you.
And you just target the West.
And that way you say, you kind of don't shit where you sleep, you know?
So it was a sign that everybody thought Alpha O2 and Alpha Bay were in Russia and that they might truly be beyond the reach of Western law enforcement.
And this was going to be like the one that will never, you know, as I talk to agents and prosecutors, you know, they would say, like, this is not, this might be like the untouchable one.
One of them called him like the Michael Jordan of the dark web.
Like, what if he's just perfect?
What if he's just so good at this that we'll never catch up with him?
He's not like going to, you know, It's not going to be the same story as with Ross Ulbricht.
Yeah, but they.
Around that time, this was like late 2016 when Alphabet was truly taking off and growing into this unprecedented, like giant bazaar of drugs and crime.
That is when a tip came into the DEA in Fresno that was basically this email address.
And it turned out that in the.
In Alphabet's very first days online, before anybody was paying attention to it, its user forums, when you signed up, you would get a welcome email, and that welcome email contained the email address pimp underscore Alex at hotmail, pimp underscore Alex underscore 91 at hotmail.com.
And somebody like this one anonymous source had recorded, had kept that email.
That email leak was fixed very quickly.
But this source had held on to that email for years, more than two years, and then sent it to this DEA agent in Fresno.
And that was by kind of following that email address, this DEA agent and the prosecutor in that office, whose name was Grant Rabin.
The DEA agent has asked me not to talk about his name, but they found that other places and were eventually able to show that it belonged to Alexander Kaz, this French Canadian guy.
Pimp Alex 91, like the 91 is his birth year.
He was really young.
And he, they could see like through his family's social media, his like in laws' social media posts, really, that he was a web developer, but he had moved to Bangkok.
And, and like his, his, he'd married a Thai woman and her family had like posted photos of him with a Lamborghini.
He had like a villa in Phuket and stuff.
And he sort of posed as like a early cryptocurrency investor and web developer who just had this money from like, Buying in early to Bitcoin.
But they had their first lead that he was perhaps Alpha 02.
And it was a pretty strong lead, but they almost didn't believe.
All based on that email address.
Exactly.
And they thought to themselves, like, yeah, this is amazing.
It's almost too good to be true.
Is somebody setting this guy up?
Is he being framed by the real Alpha 02?
And it was just around that time that.
In fact, like independently, completely, not these two FBI agents in Washington, D.C., who asked me to call them just Ali and Aaron, they were totally independently looking using Chainalysis's software at the Alphabay cluster, like this constellation of 2.5 million addresses, Bitcoin addresses that Chainalysis had figured out belonged to Alphabay.
They didn't know about what was happening in Fresno, but they thought, why don't we, like, Find a way through cryptocurrency tracing alone to figure out who Alpha O2 is, which nobody had ever done that.
Nobody had ever identified a dark web kingpin with crypto tracing.
But they had this idea that when an exit scam happens, as I mentioned, when the administrator of a dark website just steals everybody's money, every time that happens, the whole dark web freaks out and everybody warns each other, pull your money out.
Don't keep any cryptocurrency on a market that you're not about to spend right away because it's not a safe place to leave your money.
They realized like the only person who is not going to be freaked out and pull their money out of those wallets when an exit scam happens is the boss himself, the admin.
The one who controls it.
Exactly.
Right.
The one who controls the whole market.
So they started kind of, I guess, in a similar way to Sarah Micklejohn, just kind of using that idea to scan like a big chunk of the blockchain, just the Alphabay cluster within Chainalysis' software.
And they found exactly this like some collections of like big troves of.
Crypto that had sat unmoved, even as exit scams happened.
And then eventually, like some of them had been later moved out of those addresses, sent through like some hops, and then eventually ended up at exchanges.
They found one massive amount that had gone to an exchange and they sent a subpoena to that exchange.
Only after sending that subpoena did they kind of through the grapevine hear this tip about Alexander Kaz.
After learning that Fresno was onto this weird French Canadian guy in Bangkok, only then did they get the results of their subpoena.
And lo and behold, the holder of that account that had cashed out these coins from Alpha Bay belonged to Alexander Kaz.
That was real proof that he was Alpha O2.
They had traced the millions of dollars in profits of this dark web drug lord and showed that they flowed out to this exchange and were being cashed out by Kaz and his wife in some cases.
So now they had, like, you know, kind of nailed to the wall this theory that had just been totally unchargeable previously.
And they had their guy.
Where was he located?
Unmasking the Dark Web Kingpin00:06:03
He was in Bangkok.
He was, okay.
Yeah.
You said that 100 times.
I don't know.
No, yeah.
But he, like, you know, but that was just the beginning.
I mean, the, the, the, that was how they, they'd identified him.
They still had to kind of like get him dead to rights in the same way that they did, that the FBI had with Ross Ulbricht, which was not easy because, like, Kaz was smart.
He, despite that, that email slip up, which he, you know, which was brief, but really, Kind of just like head slapping, like amazing mistake to have made.
Like, he was smart and careful.
And he had learned from Ross Ulbricht, like, yes, you encrypt your laptop so that if you just close the lid, like, you never, you know, if you just close the lid, rather, like, every secret on it is scrambled such that no law enforcement agency will be able to decrypt it in all of human, you know, many human lifespans.
But, He had learned that you never like work in a public library or a public place of any kind.
You don't, he didn't open his laptop outside of his home, which was like in this, you know, a house in like behind the gates, behind a wall, the outskirts of Bangkok.
Like the logistics of getting that laptop open and unencrypted to really catch him red handed very hard.
It was going to be like a real challenge.
But you asked me, like, you know, where he didn't, like, did he not kind of like have the public ego of the Dread Pirate Roberts?
It turns out that he was posting online, really, you know, flurried, like crazy.
He was very prolific, but under a different pseudonym, which was kind of his like pickup artist, sex addict pseudonym, he was on this pickup artist forum, Rushfi.
And there he had this handle Romeo.
He, you know, enjoys.
Yes, he was like a fan of unprotected sex, as you might imagine.
What a fucking dork.
Imagine.
Yeah.
And he was, he would, I mean, he just had like endless, um, Numbers of extramarital affairs and live blog them basically.
Like, he would just pick up Thai women in his Lamborghini from like 7 Eleven or whatever, and then go have sex with them, and then just write up in this, like, just it was called the I Just Had Sex thread of like uh Rushfee.
So he's picking up prostitutes and then writing about it.
Well, posting about it, he was not even that like picky, he was just like picking up women from the parking lot of 7 Eleven, whoever they were.
Like, oh, and you know, I don't think he had like that hard of a time, unfortunately, because he was.
He was projecting wealth.
He was a white dude, which just kind of signifies money, unfortunately, in Thailand.
And yeah, I mean, and he was extremely manipulative with women and a misogynist.
And, you know, these posts are like some of the grossest shit I've ever read.
And I read like everything that he posted there.
Sick fuck.
He would, he said, he bragged about, he had like a second home he used as his like, whatever fuck pad.
Yes.
And he says that he recorded all of his sex there.
Just in case, like the women accused him of a sexual assault or whatever.
So he would have like evidence of it or something?
He says that he kept it on an encrypted hard drive and, you know, like all this.
And, but he also just like rampant misogyny, homophobia, like terrible, amoral shit.
Like he had a real, like, whoever gives the least fucks wins.
Yeah.
I think that was like an actual kind of quote from his philosophy, though.
He was truly.
It was like business philosophy?
No, from his pickup artist's philosophy.
But I think it, yeah, sure, it pervaded everything, you know, like, He was a true amoral person.
Ross Ulbricht, I think, you know, I feel for him.
And I think he's an interesting, like, sympathetic character.
And Alexander Kaz is like a true.
He's like most American businessmen.
Kind of like hollowed out, monstrous kind of person.
I mean, I'm sorry to say this because I'm like speaking ill of the dead.
We'll get to that.
Well, I mean, it's like, you know, the person who gives the least fucks wins.
It sounds like that's a very successful recipe in America, you know?
Sure.
I mean, And he was successful in business.
He was, I guess, successful in his like sex life, if you call that success.
I mean, he seemed to, I mean, if you read his Rush V posts, they're like a whole psychological portrait.
Like, I don't want to be too, I'm not a psychologist, but you can see him talk about how he was raised by his mother and his father was not around and like how he craved, like, it seems like the kind of guy who didn't get much attention from females when he was younger.
I'm sure that, I'm sorry.
That's probably true as well.
But he also, he, he, like, he, He just openly kind of had, I think, a kind of daddy complex where he wanted to.
I mean, this whole idea of Alpha O2, Alpha Bay, it was about his quest to become this weird idea of a man that was absent from his life.
I mean, he posted about how, like, I was, because my father wasn't around, I didn't learn, like, how to use a chainsaw or, like, ride a go kart or something until I was 18.
And that, like, these weird ideas of masculinity.
I don't know.
It was all very strange, but more like germane to the story.
We could talk about his complexes for a long time.
But he had posted in Rouge V about his whole pattern of life.
He posted about the encryption that he used.
This was how law enforcement was able to kind of create a profile of him and start to make a plan about how they were going to actually nab him and, more importantly, his laptop.
I mean, they could arrest him anytime.
That was the easy part.
The hard part was going to be getting that laptop open.
The War Room and Laptop Heist00:11:11
There was actually like a bizarre incident where, like, so after, sorry, I'm skipping ahead a bit.
Like, no, it's fine.
They, you know, they, the, this becomes like a massive law enforcement investigation called Operation Bayonet.
They bring in the Thai police who are extremely cooperative.
Like, the Thai, Thailand is not a good place to hide out as a drug lawyer.
Yeah.
There's a lot of DEA there and a lot of, it's like, it's just like extradition heaven practically.
You know, it's like not, it's not offshore or whatever.
It's very similar to Mexico in that way where there's a lot of DEA, DEA.
Yeah, CIA or absolutely.
It's like considered a kind of, I think, like desirable outpost, I think, as a DEA agent.
And that is who, I mean, the DEA is, once they were brought into the case, they're the ones who have all the connections to the local law enforcement.
They have the most agents abroad of any law enforcement agency.
They work like hand in glove with the Thais in Bangkok.
And so, not a good place to be hiding out as like the drug lord.
Although, you know, I don't know, he thought he would never be identified.
So maybe he was just there because he likes the weather or the sex life.
Yeah, he likes the prostitutes.
Yeah.
So the Thais are now like working with them.
And, oh, sorry, I was just getting to this.
You know, we were talking about like how it would have been easy to just like arrest him.
They actually, at one point, the whole American delegation kind of of prosecutors and agents is like has come to Thailand, to Bangkok, and they're just sitting in the lobby of their hotel where they're planning this.
They're kind of brainstorming and thinking about how they're going to do this takedown.
And, Um, the ties who are now following cause's every move with a surveillance team like send them a message that says, We see like his white Porsche Panamanera has like just parked in front of your hotel.
And then, like, the next second, and then like one of the FBI agents kind of like goes to like try to just look out the window and check it out.
And at that moment, cause walks through the door of the lobby of this hotel.
And the whole team that has by this point been tracking him for nine months is like.
What the fuck is that?
That's him.
And it's, you know, from their perspective, it's like seeing a ghost.
They think that they're blown, basically.
They think that Kaz has like figured out that he's being tailed, that he's being surveilled, and that they're onto him.
And they imagine that he's going to come over and say, I got you.
Just like, fuck off.
Like, you're not going to get the evidence you need to charge me, you know, or to extradite me.
And instead, he just sits down at the table right next to them, or he just happens to have a business meeting.
What?
Yes.
Like it was a complete coincidence.
It was totally bizarre and really freaked out, like all the agents and prosecutors who just kind of like quietly dispersed and, you know, tried to be like stealthy about it.
But that's the thing.
Like they could have arrested him at any time, but they needed to get him logged into Alphabay.
They needed to like get his laptop open.
And what did they want?
What was the most valuable thing to them in the laptop?
Well, they wanted to get a Ross Ulbricht style arrest, you know, which is like they'll see him logged into the.
Because there would be, if they arrested him without the laptop, there wouldn't be enough evidence, right?
They would be going on these blockchain trails, which are strong, but like very rarely used in court up to that point.
So that would have been a little dicey, this email, which is kind of like circumstantial almost, you know.
And then, yeah, it would have been difficult to like make it open and shut.
Case basically.
So they want like what they got with Ross Ulbricht, which is he was logged into like his mastermind account on the Silk Road.
Like that is his dead to rights evidence.
They wanted that for a cause.
By the way, there's a whole other story I've kind of skipped over here about how they found the AlphaBase server, which was using this secret technique that Chainalysis and IRS, T. Green Gumbarian actually developed together.
Something that they didn't even want to tell me about.
Right.
But I kind of like figured out by the end of the book.
Reporting like this secret surveillance technique, though they found the IP address of that server, which was in Lithuania, it turns out.
But that's just to say that they had they knew where the server was, but they had to get Kaz like connected to it, logged in, proving that he was without a doubt the owner of Alphabet.
So, with the help of this kind of like pattern of life that they've established with all these pickup artist forum posts on Rouge V, they make this plan, which is like very elaborate.
If you're ready to like, yeah.
They're like on this morning, I think it was July 5th, 2017.
There are like nine undercover agents all surrounding his house, playing different roles.
Like one is pretending to be a gardener, one is like pretending to be an electrician, like working on a wiring box.
And two of them are like you see in the movies.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like truly just this whole cast of actors almost.
And one, An American DEA agent is like pretending to be shopping for real estate in this house at the end of the block with his fake Thai wife, who is an undercover agent.
And like her job, he's supposed to distract her while she goes up and like gets eyes on the house.
And like it's just so complicated.
But then the real players in this are these two Thai female agents who drive their car down this cul de sac, pretending to be lost.
And they drive to the end of the block, kind of like really like trying to look like they're bad at driving.
And the security guard like tells them to turn around and instead, They back up and crash the car into Kaza's front gate.
This is like the kind of like go time.
In fact, what sort of triggered this is that the team in Lithuania that was supposed to basically connect to the Alpha Base server and surveil that while they do this takedown and show the connection, they fucked up and crashed the server.
So at that point is when the Lithuania team is talking to this war room of.
Agents and police and prosecutors in the Bangkok office of the Thai, the Royal Thai Police.
And they're watching surveillance feeds and everything.
And they are the ones who tell these two women, like, it's time, like, go.
And they crash this Toyota Camry into Kaza's front gate.
That's like the diversion that is meant to pull him out of his house so they can start to get in to get his laptop.
This is after they crashed the server?
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
They're like, we, He's about to see that we've crashed his server.
He can close his laptop at any time and end this whole thing.
It turns out, like, they would find out later that when the server crashed, he was like frantically sending emails to his hosting provider, like, What's going on?
Like, why is Alphabet down?
And that actually helps, is even more evidence.
But he doesn't come out.
His wife comes out and she's like, oh, it's okay.
Like, don't worry about it.
She's very sweet, actually.
I mean, I've just watched the video and I've talked through the whole, exactly what happens with all the agents there.
And his Thai wife is like, it's okay.
Don't worry about it.
But the driver of the car, this undercover agent woman, is like, no, I'm so sorry.
Like, please let me pay for it.
Please have your husband come down.
So, I can talk to him about paying him back.
I don't want to pay him my next life, she says, kind of like alluding to some Buddhist beliefs.
And so, Kaza's wife, whose name is Sunisa, shouts up to him, and they see that he's in his window actually opens.
And even on the surveillance footage, the people in the war room can see, oh, that's him.
He's got his attention.
And they can see that the blind is cracked, and he's talking to his wife.
And then he does come down, and he's like, Shirtless and shoeless, like in his gym shorts.
And I'm sorry, I just, he was also commando.
I just wasn't, didn't really want to say naked.
Yeah.
No, no, he was just going commando.
Oh, like, no, apparently.
And, and he kind of like comes out and tries to mess with the gate.
And all of the kind of different undercover agents start to like get involved.
And this one agent who was pretending to be the driver of the real estate shopping couple's car, like comes out to kind of help.
And so at this point, when he's walking down, they don't know if the laptop's open or closed or do they?
Exactly.
They don't know.
They don't.
They're just hoping to God he didn't close it.
They did see when they started this.
The thing about Rush V as well is that you can see when someone is logged in.
They're kind of icon on their name turns green and shows this person is active.
And they could see, I guess they could see that he was active, but they didn't know if the computer was going to go to sleep.
But that's when they saw that he was active.
That's when they were like, okay, we can start this.
That was like part of his, you know, sort of operational security.
Right, right.
Fuck up here, essentially.
Anyway, so I guess that's to make a long story short.
Like, at this point, it's time for them to try to get the laptop.
There's a whole kind of other pantomime here about how they got his phone.
They had to get his phone as well.
And like, one agent kind of like grabbed it out of the waistband of his shorts and stuff.
The phone ultimately had nothing important on it, so I'll skip that.
But, like, the um, at this point, like, the gardener, I think, was the one who put his police vest on and starts like running towards cause cause, like, turns and sees him, realizes what's happening, um, and goes into this fight or flight mode.
Try it, you know, immediately spins around, he knows he has to get back to his laptop.
Um, and one agent grabs him, and then another, um, they kind of like tussle, but then, like, this one agent named M who was hiding in the back seat of the Real estate shopping couple's car.
This kind of short athletic guy breaks free and his job is to like sprint into the house.
He's practiced on like other similar layout houses and everything.
Oh, they knew the exact layout of the house?
Yes, they just like studied other houses in the neighborhood.
He sprints up the stairs.
He like thinks he's got it in the home office.
He's like goes in there.
He finds that there's like two house guests who are asleep in bed.
He's like, oh, sorry.
And he like flips, spins around, goes into the bedroom and finds this like cheap white desk with the laptop.
Open, still logged into Alpha Bay.
And he lunges for it and puts his hand on the mouse pad and keeps it alive.
And that's it.
Death in a Baltimore Jail Cell00:10:45
You hear over the police radio.
And I heard this in the recording, even like officers, like, we have the laptop.
And then everybody in the war room starts cheering.
And, like, yeah, it was just very dramatic.
Sadly, you know, Kaz is then brought to Thai police headquarters, kept in a jail there for the next week.
And after one week, just before, just after he's agreed to extradition, in fact, he's found dead in a Thai jail cell.
Convenient for someone.
Yeah.
You know, I maybe didn't have a lot of, didn't he work with the Russian mafia or something?
Or he had a lot of like shady clients that possibly didn't want him to.
I did hear that.
You know, I heard that from a friend of his and it was like a bit vague.
I, there's a lot of stories you can come up with about who would have wanted him dead.
Maybe he, maybe he had like local police on the take, even.
You know, like who then were worried that they would be found out when he was captured.
You know, maybe he did like have local partners in Alphabet.
D Snake, I mentioned, was his kind of second in command.
Right.
And I mean, D Snake actually tells me, I did interview D Snake through the dark, you know, through anonymous channels later.
And he says that he had a whole plan to get cause out.
And he wouldn't tell me what it was, but it was a kind of like, Kills, I don't know what you call this, like a dead man switch.
Kill switch, yeah.
Kind of a dead man switch.
Like, if you don't hear from me for a certain amount of time, then activate the plan.
And there was money like set up for it.
And like, as in, if he's dead or if he dies, or if he's just in jail.
Okay.
Like, you like release this money or something, or like get hire a lawyer, or I don't even know what.
At one point, Kaz had like bragged to a DEA agent that I spoke to about having like a helicopter gunship that was going to come and break him out.
And I don't know if that was like a.
A silly boast or just fucking with her, or if maybe that was the plan for all I know.
But no plan like happened in time.
I mean, cause died.
And for D Snake, D Snake says that's evidence that he was killed because he would not have killed himself, which is what.
So just to be clear, prosecutors, DEA, FBI, everybody told me that cause killed himself in jail.
And T Snake says that's impossible because he would have waited for our plan at least to see if it works.
How long after he went into jail did he end up dead?
About a week.
About a week.
And what evidence was there that he actually killed himself?
Well, yeah.
So I spent time in Thailand.
I got as far as visiting the cell that he was in.
I got video of his last.
Oh, there was video of it.
There's jail cell video.
I saw that there were cameras in his cell when I was there.
And I was like, give me this video, please.
Oh, so maybe he did kill himself.
But the video, sorry.
So the video shows.
So just to be clear, like he was found asphyxiated, strangled in the back of the cell behind a kind of three foot high wall.
There was a towel wrapped around his neck.
The suicide theory is that he basically like wrapped this towel around his neck, made a noose of it, put it in the hinge of the door, which is this kind of like swinging three foot high door, and then just like.
Lean forward, which sounds totally implausible, but if you read the medical literature, which I looked into, it's really grisly stuff.
It is like, I mean, I don't want to get into it, I don't want to give people ideas, but it's easier than you think to kill yourself that way, to kill yourself without suspending your full body.
But so I looked at this jail cell video, which I did get.
I mean, they gave it to me the time.
Well, I can't say exactly who gave it to me, but I got it.
The law enforcement as a whole were cooperative about giving me that video.
I didn't like get it from a hacker or something.
Okay.
Okay.
And it shows him kind of looking out of the.
Cell looking up and down the jail like hallway, then he disappears in the back.
The part of the cell where he died was not on camera.
And in fact, there was a gap in the footage then.
And the next thing you see, you actually see, you can kind of see him messing with the towel.
Yeah.
Even just like a tiny bit by himself, by himself in the corner of the frame.
Nobody else in his cell.
No one else in his cell.
And then there's a half hour gap.
And then the next thing you see in the footage.
Is everybody rushing in and finding his dead body?
So it's just totally.
Why a half hour gap?
Well, this is the thing.
Like, they tell me that I was told it was because nothing happened.
There's nothing on the video at that point.
Why keep it?
And the ties, you know, I just have to.
I feel like you should not.
That's like so insulting to say that.
You shouldn't, you should not like assume malice where it could just be incompetence.
Like, the ties are probably not used to media scrutiny or.
You know, and I could just imagine that they thought it made sense to delete this like boring half hour of nothing happening in the cell just to save space on the drive.
Like, that is the part where he actually dies, though.
Well, you can't see anything.
Oh, it's all in the back, it's all off camera anyway.
Okay, okay.
What it doesn't prove, I mean, what it would have showed if he killed himself, if we could, if he did kill himself.
I truly am trying to be clear here that I don't know what happened, right?
Um, like, I'm not taking, I'm not.
Leaning either way.
I'm fully like, and then that's not just as a journalist.
Like, if I had an inkling of like, if I could prove it either way, then I would say so.
But what you don't see is like half an hour of nobody going into his cell.
You don't see it, like, the footage is not there.
There's no footage.
So, what it doesn't, what I don't have is like, is some dispositive thing of like seeing, yeah, he like goes to the back, there's half an hour of nobody entering his cell, then he's found dead.
That would have, I think it proved that it was suicide to me.
Yeah.
Instead, we have this mysterious half hour that his lawyer, you know, his defense attorney, who's convinced that he was murdered, was like, What the hell?
Like, that's even worse.
Well, if he was murdered, why would he set up the noose or the out of the bed sheets himself?
Well, you know, like, if you were.
You can't actually see him make a noose.
You just see him kind of messing with the towel.
Who knows?
Maybe he was like taking a shower, like about to.
Oh, you can't actually see him fashioning any sort of noose.
Oh, okay.
So, like, The theory that he was killed is that he, I mean, it would have had to have been in that half hour.
Said somebody came in and like killed him, choked him with the towel.
Was there an autopsy?
There was an autopsy.
I read the report.
I mean, this is like a really impressive, you know, it's impressive that I got it, it's impressive that they were willing to share it.
But it is a Thai coroner report.
I don't know like how.
Was there any sort of indication or any sort of details about that hyoid bone in the neck?
You know, the bone that they found in Epstein that was fractured.
And I guess there's tons of reports.
Wow, you've gone deep on Epstein, clearly.
I mean, that's, and that is, of course, the model for what everybody imagines happened here.
The missing footage, like there was a jail cell footage, but it's missing.
And like, there's this bone in the neck that if it's broken, that they say that that bone never breaks when someone just sort of asphyxiates themselves.
It's only from some severe trauma.
That's interesting.
I, you know, it wasn't, there was no mention of that in the report.
I'm learning about this bone from you right now.
Okay.
Pull up something on the hyoid bone.
Maybe we can look at it.
Yeah.
The report just says like deaths from asphyxiation.
No sign of anyone else's DNA on his fingernails, finger hands, anything, for instance, which might have been.
But I just want to, this is the Thai police corner.
And if we're worried that the Thais were the Thai police or someone in Thai police, I talked to many of the Thai police involved in this investigation.
They struck me as honest and not corrupt people, although there are absolutely huge pockets of corruption in the Royal Thai police.
I didn't see that in the people that I spoke with who were involved in this, and they kind of had a good reputation.
That's part of why they were brought in to this international case.
But yeah, if there were corrupt people who had him killed, then they could have easily had the coroner's report written up in a certain way as well.
So I'm not sure what any of that proves.
I mentioned Grant Rabin, the prosecutor in the case.
He actually was in Thailand for all of this, and he interviewed Cause.
Before he killed himself, before he killed himself or was murdered, and says that he kind of saw this side of cause.
Like he was kind of shocked by cause's personality, which seemed to be kind of flat and unconcerned about his fate, and not like a sociopath, but someone, but very strange.
And Grant would put it to me as he was a gamer, he kind of played his life like a game.
Once you like, The game is over, you just turn the machine off.
Once you've got the highest score you can get and things are not working out for you, you just hit the reset button.
That's how he thinks Cos thought and lived his life.
Interesting.
Cos's defense attorney saw it completely differently, of course, and said that Cos was concerned for his safety, concerned for his family, wanted to make sure nobody believed that he was cooperating, which, of course, the prosecutors and agents wanted him to become a source.
And flip and like become even possibly like an undercover, help them with undercover operations and things.
The Hyoid Bone Mystery00:02:44
And doesn't buy any of this stuff about cause, like being ready to die.
Right.
So, what does this say?
Oh, hyoid bone fracture.
Here you go.
The hyoid bone fracture is a very rare fracture of the hyoid bone, accounting for 0.002% of all fractures in humans.
It is commonly associated with strangulation and rarely occurs in isolation.
The fracture may be associated with.
Gunshot injury, car accidents, or induced vomiting.
In 50% of strangulations and 27% of hangings, the fracture occurs.
And Epsom's bone was broken.
Yeah.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because if you want to get into it, like what I learned from reading the medical literature on strangulation and auto asphyxiation, like killing yourself this way, is that it's way too easy.
Like it's shockingly easy.
Easy people die in auto asphyxiation accidents all the time, like autoerotic asphyxiation.
Do they really?
Well, it seems so.
I mean, I'm not an expert in this, but I read some studies just to see what I was trying to find out is like, you know, Kaza's defense attorney was like, he hung himself from a three foot high wall and died.
Like, that does not make any sense.
That just the physics of that do not make sense.
Right.
But then when you read about it, yes, like people die, like people hang themselves in a seated position, in a kneeling position, very often, like in an autoerotic position.
Like asphyxiation scenarios, right?
Not to like, sorry, this is really grisly stuff to get into, and then accidentally die, yeah.
Um, frequently from this, and so, and that doesn't happen by like breaking a bone, or like it's not like you've, um, like violently snapped your neck or something, right?
Exactly.
So, if he, like, if his bone was not fractured, that would indicate that he did actually like strangulate himself, he actually did kill himself.
But if the bone was broken in his neck, yeah, that would suggest that there was some violent trauma.
Well, I'm now like.
Just based on this conversation alone, you know, sounds pretty convincing that Epstein was strangled.
Yeah.
Because the cause and the way that you do this, like when you're, you know, if you were sorry, the cause case is I'm not, this doesn't prove anything either way about him, but he, all he had to do was kind of cut off blood flow, which is much less sort of high force violent act than what you're talking about, which would break a bone.
Sabotaging Hansa Market00:03:43
So, Um, cause this case remains unsolved.
Like, I did truly everything in my power to come to a conclusion and I could not.
Um, but uh, I don't know.
Like, the Epstein thing seems really suspicious, yeah, yeah, extremely dark and a deep rabbit hole to fall down, yeah.
Um, so but uh, yeah, that was the end of the alpha based.
Well, in some ways, it was the end.
Like, we didn't even get into this other thing.
Like, I mentioned that they wanted to flip cause, um, but in fact.
They had simultaneously, this is like the size of this investigation.
It was so sprawling.
At the same time that Alphabet was taken down, the Dutch police had taken over this second biggest dark web market called Hansa.
And they were, they had, the Dutch police were running the entire market undercover.
They had taken the positions of the actual bosses of that dark web market and had turned the whole thing into a kind of surveillance trap, such that when Alphabet was taken down, All of AlphaBay's buyers and sellers just flooded into the second biggest market.
This is what always happens on the dark web.
You just go to the next market when one is shut down, which was Hansa in this case, which was the whole thing, a kind of giant trap for all of AlphaBay's refugees.
Wow.
And that was.
So they had like a net on the backside to basically catch everybody.
Yes.
I mean, it was like truly an unprecedented operation in the history of dark web law enforcement.
They did this kind of one, two punch thing where they.
Not only did they take down the biggest dark web market in history, but then had this net, as you said, waiting for thousands and thousands of really the dealers, is who they're going after, of course, just ready to catch them as they moved into Hansa, where basically Hansa's code had been sabotaged to remove all the safeguards.
As I said, a dark web market is not supposed to even know who is visiting.
They shouldn't know who you are any more than you know who they are.
Hansa had been kind of like silently rewritten by the Dutch police so that it could find out all these things about you.
Was recording like all this information.
It was like they tricked people into basically downloading malware.
It was like it looked like sort of sales spreadsheets, but in fact, it had a kind of homing beacon in it to identify drug dealers.
They even did this like complex thing.
They, at one point, pretended they were trying to hire a new kind of administrator for the market.
And if you applied, they would say, Well, we need to send you a YubiKey, like a USB key to like you would plug into.
Confirm for your security.
And in the packet, they would mail the YubiKey hidden inside.
It's common to use this kind of camouflage when sending drugs or sending anything, but they would hide it inside of a stuffed animal, like a stuffed panda.
And this panda also had hidden a GPS beacon so that they could locate the, you know, even if you received your dark web mail at a drop address, which is like, you know, the smarter way to do it.
You have some address that's not your home where you receive the stuff.
The idea is that you would take this stuffed panda without thinking back to your house and it would have a GPS beacon in it and they would find the people who were applying to work as administrators of a dark web market this way.
GPS Beacons on Stuffed Pandas00:03:55
And this was a giant, like, just a feeding frenzy for law enforcement in terms of eventually arresting hundreds and hundreds of dealers.
And it was sort of fed into a database, of course, of all this information that they'd collected from this huge.
Thing, Operation Bayonet, about Alphabet users, about Hansa users, went into this database.
And then, over the next years, there were just one huge takedown after another.
So it's not easy to trace exactly which arrests it led to, but there were just dozens of tons of drugs and millions and millions of dollars and hundreds of people arrested as a result of this.
So, how has this all affected this underground drug market today?
What is the current state of Sort of dark web drug dealing and this kind of stuff.
Yeah, this is the great twist ending, which is that just as I was finishing the reporting on this, and really like finally, you know, it took me five years to really like get the full Alpha Bay story.
I mean, it was publicly announced as like, yeah, we did this massive takedown.
Then it became clear, holy shit, they did like a takeover of the second, like this.
And but all of that was sort of understood like as a sort of almost just like a press release in 2017.
Uh, it took me five years to really learn the details of how it all truly happened and to speak to everybody involved and like truly tell the story.
And just as I was finishing that reporting, Alpha Bay came back online and is now being run by D Snake, the second in command.
Oh, the guy you talked to, yes, like uh, Alpha Bay is back and D Snake is in charge and um, he is like, you know, it's not going anywhere.
And how long has he been in charge?
How long has this been going on?
I guess, let's see.
So I think it came back online in the summer of like late 20, summer 2021.
Okay.
And of course it was relaunched from scratch.
So it had none of the, I don't know, I was like the thousands of dealers had moved elsewhere.
Yeah.
Had to be persuaded to come back basically.
And it's taken almost until now, probably to, well, not to even get close, I would say, to Alpha Base original.
Well, to its peak.
But I think it has, by some measures, become.
I was looking at the numbers recently and it's harder to analyze than you might think because Alphabet is doing a better job of obscuring its business.
But it has, by some measures, become the biggest dark web drug market again.
So I'm sure he's read your book and I'm sure he's well aware of how this all works now.
Well, he didn't need to read my book to know, like, what, you know, actually maybe he did, but some parts of it he might have known about how cause got.
And I think he definitely had learned lessons from that.
Some of them were pretty apparent.
Like he knows that Kaz's laptop was grabbed.
He says he has all these kill switch things where, if his laptop is taken, if his server is seized, it'll be destroyed.
And like Alphabet can be rebuilt automatically with like new computers and a lot of stuff.
It's hard to decipher how much of it is real or would work.
But yeah, you'd think that, you know, after Alpha 02 and Ross being caught with their laptops open, they would.
Figure out some sort of way to like remotely control their laptop being encrypted, like either on a phone or like absolutely.
But also, D Snake just says, like, he just doesn't ever walk away from his open laptop.
I mean, that's the easy thing, right?
He doesn't, like, when he's just even when he goes to the bathroom, he told me he does not leave it open.
Truly Untraceable Cryptocurrencies00:09:52
Um, you know, everybody has their own claims, everybody has their own reason for overconfidence.
You know, each one of these guys thought that they had outsmarted the system.
The one thing that I was really impressed with is that this was the whole cryptocurrency tracing part of how they got cause was never really public.
But somehow DSnake did figure out that that was a big part of the investigation, or maybe he just guessed.
And so Alphabet now only uses Monero, a newer cryptocurrency that is designed to be far less traceable.
That's a big sacrifice in a sense because most people don't want to use Monero.
A lot of people never heard of it.
So, you're reducing your revenue by doing that.
But DSnake understands that money laundering is just essential and that you don't take risks about financial trails.
I think it's like Zcash or something too.
Yeah, exactly.
So, that's very hard to trace, almost impossible.
Yeah.
I appreciate you brought it up because Zcash, I think, is probably the least traceable.
In fact, it's like perhaps truly untraceable.
I know I made that mistake with Bitcoin, one of them believed that about Bitcoin, but I do just like.
Talking to the researchers, looking at how it works, Zcash is almost like magically untraceable.
It uses the Z in Zcash, which comes from zero knowledge proofs, which are these sort of very, I don't know, like hard to even get your mind around kind of mathematical proofs where you can essentially the whole Zcash blockchain is encrypted, but you can do a sort of mathematical kind of process on it where you can check that a A transaction happens that is, you know, you cannot counterfeit something or double spend a coin or whatever,
but you can do that while learning zero knowledge basically about the transaction other than the fact that it was real and that it, you know, and that can basically like serve to um guarantee this cryptocurrency Zcash in the same way that the normal blockchain does with Bitcoin, but without a blockchain that can reveal anything to anybody, you know, to it's truly a black box, right?
You know, it's called Bitcoin.
I think, like, at one point, I thought it was the holy grail of the cypherpunks for financial privacy, but Zcash really does seem to be it.
I mean, it's interesting we're talking about this because, like, maybe you can hear in the way I'm saying it that Monero, I'm not sure, is that.
Like, Monero, the one that is much more popular, I think it is at this point, still than Zcash, is thought to be untraceable, is no doubt far, far harder to trace than Bitcoin, is being used by people on the dark web like DSnake and Alphabay.
But I don't think it is.
Truly mathematically untraceable.
And the degree to which it can be traced, you know, is just the fact that there is any possibility of tracing means that Chainalysis and that now a whole industry of companies competing with Chainalysis.
Chainalysis is now an $8.6 billion startup.
They have money to recruit the smartest people thinking of new tricks to, you know, unmask, to trace, to de anonymize any cryptocurrency that has like the slightest foothold, a little bit of like.
Hints or a clue of how to follow the money.
So I would still, you know, if I were like a high net worth dark web criminal, I would still be pretty concerned about using Monero.
Yeah.
And that's not just speculation.
Like, it was actually D Snake himself in our conversation at one point, our conversations over like some weeks, who, Was like, hey, look at this.
This just popped up.
And it was a link to a dark web site called Dark Leaks that some hacker had set up that was a collection of documents from the Italian police.
And it revealed like some of the information about how the Italian police had taken down a couple of dark websites.
And one of the files on it was a presentation that Chainalysis had given to the Italian police about their capabilities.
And In that presentation, in Italian, it says, like, we can trace Monero in the majority of cases.
And it breaks it down like, in 60% of cases, we can get a usable lead.
In another 15% of cases, we can find the sender, but not the recipient, that kind of thing.
They sort of admit in this presentation that it's kind of probabilistic.
It's not like definitive in the way that it has been with Bitcoin.
But that's often good enough to start just like sending out those subpoenas.
And like, you only have to have a kind of educated guess in a lot of cases to send subpoenas to start doing.
Searches in some cases.
So I think that, like, a lot of cryptocurrency users are still probably falling for this trap of thinking that they're using an untraceable currency that is not quite untraceable.
And that might just be enough for them to be completely traced and caught.
So, but I do think Zcash may be an exception to that.
I can't imagine what it must be like to be you, to be working on a story like this for five years and putting it together.
And in the meantime, you're also doing active reporting.
You're, you know, you're, you're, Publishing all these other stories in the same time you're putting together these books.
This is what your third book?
Yeah, this is my third book.
You know, I've covered it all as it was happening.
You know, in 2018, I managed to get a couple of those Dutch agents to talk to me and I wrote a story about the Hansa part of it, that second biggest dark web market that they took over.
So, and then for most of the rest of those years, I'm just like running into dead ends, hitting brick, hitting my head against brick walls and, and, It's not like I'm slowly, consistently making progress and getting this.
And the true breakthrough was when I realized, when I started to see that cryptocurrency tracing was this incredibly important new investigative technique, not new by 2020, but like new to me, and digging into that.
And then I learned that it was the kind of crucial weapon used to, well, yeah, the kind of crucial like fingerprinting technique that had found cause and the identified Alpha Bay, Alpha O2, and Was this kind of critical ingredient to taking down Alphabet?
That's when the thing kind of like opened up for me.
Like, I started to learn about the crypto tracers who had been involved.
And then once you kind of like had your foot in the door and you're talking to some of the major players, the other ones are like, well, we want to tell you are part of it too.
You know, people don't want to get left out.
Even the ones whose names are anonymized and stuff.
Like, I think that they also, you know, I really appreciate that people tell these stories.
Even anonymously, even with pseudonyms and stuff, because they just know that like this story is too crazy to not take to their grave, you know?
Right.
I appreciate that about people that like they want to tell their craziest stories.
It must be so wild for you reporting on all these things from, you know, these cryptocurrency marketplaces and these dark web drug marketplaces and hackers that you talk to.
And there must be so many dots that connect for you, like reporting on different stories and finding out how different things connect because you're in this, like, you're so like.
Engulfed in this dark web underworld.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess so.
Like, I, um, how do you choose what stories to report on?
Like, how do you pick?
How do you decide what you're going to, what you're going to either write a book about or what you're going to report on?
Well, you know, I, I don't know.
I like, um, I, it, it, I got lucky in a sense that, like, um, as you say, that it all kind of connected.
I had been so obsessed with the Silk Road, um, when it appeared and it just seemed like such a fascinating story.
And I was totally, Beaten to that story by Nick Bilton, who wrote the book about it.
And I was like, that is going to be the best story I ever encounter in my career.
And this whole story of how cryptocurrency has unlocked the dark web.
And then I was just lucky enough that it turned out that I had exactly the wrong idea about it.
And in fact, cryptocurrency was the fatal flaw of the dark web.
And the whole thing, I just kind of was able to flip it.
And instead of talking to the The criminal sides, which I'd always thought was the right approach to get the best story, and often is, but like, um, it turns out that, in this case, law enforcement really was able to tell me the story better than anybody because they were the ones who figured out this like crazy revelation that you could trace cryptocurrency or, you know, with the help of Chainalysis and Sarah Micklejohn and, you know, and that perspective.
I never really told a story from law enforcement's perspective in this way before, and I was a little wary of doing so.
Um, but I think that in a way it's like even more dramatic because you can see.
You can see the story in a way that even the criminals could not see it.
They thought that they were invisible and they were not.
And you can watch them through this kind of secret lens.
And that provided just amazing, dramatic irony.
Meeting Assange Before Cablegate00:16:00
But I guess to your question of how do I find the next big story?
I write all kinds of sizes of stories.
I write web stories.
I wrote a story about a chain analysis research report that I published today that's kind of daily.
Um, fodder kind of stuff, and I think it's important sometimes, but really, it's almost like I'm looking for like this the storytelling arc.
I mean, you're a storyteller.
You probably like think about this too.
Like, you don't want to just.
For a news story, it's like one fact can be the whole thing.
For a magazine story, it's like maybe one character can be just enough.
For a book, you need like an actual whole arc of like twists and turns and a climax and like that kind of thing.
And so I'm just, I don't know.
In a way, I'm just kind of like surveying like all these crazy stories happening in the hacker world and the dark web and.
It's only when one of them kind of fits that almost like three act structure or whatever that I think, like, oh, this needs to be a book.
Yeah.
Do you ever get any pushback from editors when you're working on stories?
Because you've worked for like big publications, Forbes, Wired.
Like, do you ever deal with any of that?
Like, any sort of pushback or any sort of trying to like, you know, square the circle type thing with people?
That's interesting.
Like, when I was at Forbes, I sometimes felt like, why do they let me write for this place?
Like, it was a pretty conservative, I'm not sure it's quite as conservative now.
It had definitely like some conservative leanings.
Probably still, I think it still does.
Yeah.
I mean, I think when anybody nowadays thinks about any big publication, you automatically just figure out, okay, do I paint them left or do I paint them right?
You know, it's like politics are so injected into every mainstream news publication now.
And so, you know, like I remember the editor in chief of Forbes when I was, I did like a big piece on the Dread Pirate Roberts and based on my interview with him.
And He was a little bit like, Why are we like giving a platform to this drug dealer to like to hawk his shit through our magazine, you know?
Like, and as a result, he there was like a little bit of like, I mean, I this is typical stuff for Mac, you know, when you work with editors, and it's not, I don't think it's like criminal or anything, but but there were little injections of like of jabs at him, and it's like, um, there, you know.
At that point, the Silk Road was getting hit with a lot of sort of low level cyber attacks from other dark web people and hackers and stuff.
And I had mentioned that in the piece that there was a kind of war, I guess, a bit of conflict within these groups.
And they were accusing the Silk Road of accusing other dark web markets of hitting it with these attacks.
And an editor added in, as always happens with the drug world, now there's internecine gang warfare and violence has entered.
And I was sort of like, It's not violence.
This is actually the alternative to real violence.
It's just like some dudes, some nerds hitting each other with data packets instead of bullets.
So I do kind of look at that piece now and think, oh, that wasn't the right approach to talking about this.
That does not give enough credit to whatever credit is due.
And you can tell that I have a very complicated feeling about the Silk Road.
It did eliminate some kinds of violence.
From the drug trade and deserves credit for that.
And I think that, like, the slightly older, maybe just socially conservative editors of Forbes, like, sometimes were, I think, a little wary of giving it that credit, you know?
But I have to say, like, Forbes was a wonderful place to work in a lot of respects.
Like, I, and they gave me the freedom to chase these stories, even though it was not very Forbes y very often.
And I spent like years just like covering Anonymous and WikiLeaks and stuff that was not at all.
Like what you would think Forbes would be interested in.
And Parme Olson, who wrote a great book about Anonymous, also worked at Forbes at the same time.
And Kashmir Hill, who now works at the Times and covers like some, you know, she covers surveillance and privacy, was there too.
It was like actually a wonderful newsroom.
And we had a really long leash.
And there was, you know, like sometimes these bits of like editorial injections, but it was like not a, it was a cool place to work.
Is that, were you working for Forbes when you actually sat down with Julian Assange?
Yeah.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And that was like, you know, I mean, to be fair, like I came up with a Forbesy sort of angle for the piece that we did based on that, which was like, WikiLeaks has now disemboweled the US military and dumped their secrets on the web.
But it could happen to you, CEO, whatever.
This could happen to your company too.
WikiLeaks can, and that model of leaking and whistleblowing is just as ripe for disrupting companies as it is governments.
And that was kind of the excuse that I had to write this big piece about Assange and WikiLeaks for the magazine at the time.
And they put Assange on the cover.
And it was like Assange wants to leak your corporate secrets, you know.
But I was happy to, I was fine with that angle because it was true.
And, and like it gave me, and it also allowed me to like go meet Assange in 2010, just before the biggest leak he ever did, which was Cablegate, the, you know, quarter million State Department cables that really, I think it was kind of like in some ways the climax of like what WikiLeaks ever was.
Explain what Cablegate was again for people to understand.
Well, yeah.
So, over the course, this is all I think it's fair to say now.
Was this after the collateral murder stuff?
Yes.
Okay.
So, 2010 was the big year for WikiLeaks.
Okay.
Now we're going way back.
Like, the April of 2010 is when Collateral Murder came out, which was this.
That's what they called it.
That was WikiLeaks' title for it.
It was a video from, I think it was an Apache helicopter cockpit, like the view from the pilots, the gunner's perspective.
As they fired on these civilians and journalists in Iraq and killed like several of them, WikiLeaks obtained this and published it.
And that was when I was like, holy shit, I'd heard of WikiLeaks, but I never, it was like, this is some extremely explosive shit that they're getting.
And they had not got it from a hacker or whatever.
They got it through a leaker.
Like they got it through their anonymous.
Essentially, dark web.
We didn't call it that so much back then, but it was a dark web uploading portal, basically.
They were using Tor in the same way that the Silk Road was, or not in the same way.
They were using the same tool, but they were using it to grant anonymity to sources.
Right.
So that nobody could trace the leak, essentially.
That was the idea.
And Chelsea Manning was able to thus share.
A giant trove of classified secrets with WikiLeaks.
Chelsea Manning was found out, of course, through her associations with this other hacker, Adrian Lamo, and who kind of ratted her out.
And so that's not a very nice way to say it, but turned her in.
But WikiLeaks, the reason that I got interested in the dark web really was because of WikiLeaks and sort of tracing its origins in this cypherpunk dark web world.
Julian Assange was a member of the cypherpunks in the 90s, you know, like talking about using encryption technology to like change the world.
So, yeah, so then like Collateral Murder came out in April.
I think then in July, the Afghan war logs came out, this giant collection of classified documents from the war in Afghanistan, WikiLeaks published.
Then the Iraq war logs, war diaries, I think it was called later.
And then by that time, I was already trying to get to Assange, trying to make inroads with WikiLeaks.
I found this weird guy named PenguinX on the WikiLeaks IRC channel who.
Then I was like chatting with him over like this encrypted thing, and like he was like, Come to Iceland.
And I did and like met him and sort of like hung out waiting to hear.
Like Julian Assange at that point.
He was like, Come to Iceland, but there's no guarantees you're going to meet Julian.
Well, they told me that I would, but like they wouldn't say when or where and stuff like that.
And Assange actually was sort of, I don't know if he was quite on the run, but he had been accused of these sex crimes against two Swedish women and gone off the map.
I think it turned out that he was actually just like staying in this house in the English countryside.
And so I was told to go to London.
I flew from Reykjavik to London and I met with Assange in London and interviewed him.
And that was really like the genesis of my first book, which was about WikiLeaks, but about the cypherpunk movement that gave rise to WikiLeaks and about the ways that people for decades.
Tried to develop this cryptographic anonymity technology and hoped to change the world with it.
Which, in the case of WikiLeaks and a lot of the other stories I tell in that book, were about trying to free the world's information, to allow leakers and whistleblowers to just dump it or to hand it over to somebody like WikiLeaks.
Or, in some cases, the first person who came up with this idea was this cypherpunk crypto anarchist guy named Tim May.
And he had envisioned this idea of like a kind of eBay firm, like black market eBay for information where anybody can go on there and buy and using cryptographic anonymity.
He imagined something like Tor, although it didn't exist, and buy and sell secrets, which is exactly what the Silk Road was.
He just never imagined that like the contraband could be physical, could be like drugs hidden in a package.
I mean, nobody thought that the mail system actually would allow that.
That was the big.
One other big surprise of how well Silk Road worked.
Was Julian everything you thought he would be?
What was he like in person?
What kind of guy was he?
Yeah, I mean, man, this is like, I don't know, how long ago?
12 years ago?
He was really charming.
He was like, I don't know, I was a little shocked at how tall and handsome he was.
He had just cut all of his hair to like this short kind of, and he was wearing a suit, which was all really surprising.
And wasn't how I expected.
You know, I thought of him at the time because he had long hair and looked like a hacker and dressed like, you know, these hackery ways.
And he was like, he was like good at sort of charming me and flattering me.
And he definitely, you know, he was a great interview.
He had like really interesting things to say.
I was very taken by him, to be honest.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I thought he was just like, A super fascinating and admirable person at the time.
And I think it, you know, it was in the process of writing that book that I, you know, when I tried to talk to him again, when he kind of showed more of some of his true colors, that like I realized that he was, among other things, just so arrogant.
Yeah.
Like to a degree that like, you know, I, I don't think it wasn't like the points to like judge his character.
You know, I wasn't ever really just trying to like, Do the celebrity profile of Assange.
But I think that it does speak to, like, he had an enormous amount of power and as the controller of all of these secrets ultimately.
And I think it both kind of warped him a little.
I talk about that in the book.
I mean, everybody I think who lives in that secret world gets a bit warped by it.
Yeah.
And also, I think he was extremely paranoid for good reason.
And that also, like, it's a hard way to live.
Yes.
Did you record the interview?
Yeah, I did.
I don't know if I have it anymore.
Oh, God.
My God.
It's just been so long.
How long was it?
How long was the whole conversation?
I think it was like four hours.
Yeah.
I mean, we published the whole QA online, but I don't know if I have the audio anymore.
I wouldn't have even back then recorded it to my phone or something.
I would have used a tiny tape recorder, like one of those old fashioned digital recorders.
And I remember it's actually fascinating.
I remember that I had two.
To be safe, just to, you know, like, yeah, just be careful.
And at one point, he and his, I thought she worked like for him at WikiLeaks.
It turns out that I would say, like, this is Sarah Harrison.
Sarah Harrison came to our interview as well.
She was, I think, ultimately like a really important person and kind of took over a lot of the responsibilities of WikiLeaks, was instrumental in helping Snowden get out of like, Well, to get to freedom, if you call it that in Russia.
Yeah.
Anyway, at one point, like they were like, can we have a moment to discuss something privately?
And I took my recorder with me, but I accidentally left one in the room.
Oh, no.
And they just had a whole like conversation that I recorded.
Well, I didn't record it actually.
What I just as they were starting to talk, I was like, oh, I left the other recorder in.
And I went back and I said, I like said, I've.
They're talking shit about you and you're not here with that motherfucker.
I mean, they were probably planning like the drop of the.
Of Cablegate, you know, they just told me or whatever, you know, for all I know, they were just like talking about like how to get to their next like meeting or whatever.
But I remember I went and I was like, oh, sorry, I actually left another recorder in here, but I've thought like, wow, I could have recorded a secret conversation about WikiLeaks like plans at that point.
I would have been like totally unethical to do that.
But they had told me in that interview, we have something, we have our biggest thing ever.
Planned.
So it's this is good timing when you come out with your cover story about, you know, this big interview with Assange.
We're going to drop something, but they didn't say what it was.
And it turns out that it was this collection of a quarter million State Department cables, which are like, you know, secret communications between all of the embassies in the world.
Is that when that one communicate, the communications came out between like Victoria Newland and the guy, Gregory Pyatt, who is the guy in Ukraine?
He was the U.S. Head of the embassy in Ukraine, and there was like some conversations where they were trying to install a coup in Ukraine, like install a new leader of Ukraine.
The Russiagate Investigation00:11:01
And they're like having a discussion, like, oh, we should get this guy, maybe this guy.
Can we get Biden to sign off on this guy?
I think that was a part of Cablegate, maybe.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, the thing is, it's a gigantic trove of documents that show how the US really thought about international relations.
And it will be studied and used for decades to come.
I mean, it is like an archive of incredible material.
I didn't write about every revelation.
You can write whole books and people have about what they revealed.
I was interested in how it was obtained and the techniques and the methods and the thinking of WikiLeaks in how they wanted to explode institutional secrecy, which they really effectively did very well and would continue to do in interesting ways for years to come.
We can get into WikiLeaks' role in 2016, which is more about.
We haven't even talked about my second book, which is about Russian hackers and the.
You know, the GRU military intelligence agency, which ties in with their like.
Yeah, I'm really interested in talking about that.
We're going to have to do another podcast.
Yeah, I'd be happy to.
I mean, there's, yeah, I think as you can tell, like Tracers in the Dark, this new book, like it does kind of, it's like the culmination of like a decade of reporting for me that's kind of about the dark web and about cryptocurrency, which I was like, which when it appeared was this new fascination.
But then I took like this years long detour that I'm still on somewhat to like cover state sponsored hacking and cyber war.
And like that's still a big part of what I cover.
I mean, it's all part of that hacker world, but like.
Hold on a second.
I'm going to have him order you an Uber so we can keep talking and we don't have to sit here and wait for 10 minutes.
Yeah.
So I spent some years and I still am covering that world of state sponsored hackers who are really very, very different from.
The hacker undergrounds of like whatever the dark web or the hacktivist community that I was really interested in, and like you know, a decade ago, they don't talk, they're incredibly sophisticated comparatively, you know.
And yeah, the Russiagate story is crazy too.
I was listening to something this morning from Glenn Greenwald talking about Russiagate, and he had an amazing quote about it.
He said, Russiagate is the WMD of our generation.
I disagree with Glenn Greenwald about a lot of that.
Oh, do you really?
Yeah.
So I think I appreciate his skepticism.
And I think that there were definitely parts of Russiagate that were overblown.
The people were looking for that smoking gun of collusion or whatever.
I was not truly.
But I don't know, man, this is a big topic to open up with.
At the end of it, I know, right?
We have five minutes talking about Russia.
Three hour conversation.
No, I'll just say this much, and I think Glenn Greenwald has come around on this too.
The GRU hacked the DNC and the Democratic and the Clinton campaign and the DCCC and leaked that information to WikiLeaks.
And everything that was published by WikiLeaks was part of a Russian, of a GRU information operation.
Like all of those, you know.
Parceled out leaks that kind of dominated so many of the headlines of the 2016 election were absolutely engineered by Russian state sponsored hacking.
And, like, I've, I mean, this is truly a can of worms.
I thought there was no evidence, though.
Like, the FBI's long report that came out, there was no actual evidence that Russia had hacked it.
Is that?
No, there is evidence.
There is evidence.
Absolutely.
And there's some evidence that, like, you know, is just laid out in, like, kind of Department of Justice indictments where you can see what they did, but they don't exactly tell you how they found it.
There's other evidence.
That you can see just flat out, like sitting in public from cybersecurity companies who like pointed out, like, look what we found.
And cybersecurity companies, by the way, when they get things wrong, another one jumps on them and says, look, we're going to debunk this.
Like the whole cybersecurity, I would say, researcher community knew that Russia had done this right off the bat.
And yes, there was well founded, you know, well, I would say, very warranted skepticism about it.
But there's a kind of like community that, You know, that through a process of like checking each other's work, found yes, like this looks solid, really looks like the GRU hacked the DNC.
Oh, yeah.
And now the hacker who seems to have done it says that he gave this stuff to WikiLeaks, who is Guccifer 2.0.
The actual evidence of like how I don't know, I don't mean to like point people to a competitor, but I talked through all of this with Julian.
Oh, did you?
Yes.
And Julian Dory and like.
Oh, Dory.
Okay.
Yes, not Julian Assange.
That would be different.
I don't know if you can, I mean, you and Julian are.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Julian's an amazing man, smart guy.
And he, you know, is skeptical about this too, as I think you are.
But in the first episode that we did, you know, we walked, I tried my best on the spot.
I wasn't really like, it was just off the top of my head to walk him through the evidence that I remember, remember just like, you know, off, you know, on the spot that shows that it was.
Russian hackers who hacked the DNC.
So, from what I understood, was that the Hillary campaign tried to get hackers inside Ukraine to get dirt on the Trump campaign.
And then it sort of backfired.
And it ended up being this whole Russiagate thing.
And then the media narrative kind of like spun out of control and was all one way.
We could do a whole podcast just on this.
We should.
Well, I'll just say this.
Like, let me just say, like, try to say this as quickly as I can.
Because it's super technical.
It's not super technical, but it's a bit technical.
Yeah.
But the same hackers who, like, Your driver will be here in four minutes.
I got four minutes.
You're on the clock.
The same hackers who sent a phishing email to John Podesta that they used to fake a Google login, get his account information.
This was a group called Fancy Bear.
You can see they made the mistake of using a URL shortening service to create those phishing web pages.
And because they use one service, you can kind of identify a pattern in all of the URLs that they created.
And so you can actually see everyone that they targeted.
And several groups, companies have mapped out basically where they sent all those phishing emails as a result.
And it is like Ukrainians, people in NATO, people critical of Russia in US academia.
It is very much like, just to try to highlight not just who they are, but their motivations, they look like people extremely aligned with Russian state interests, not Ukrainian interests, for instance.
But then also, like the very first leaks that were published by Gutschiffer 2.0 after the DNC was hacked, Gutschiffer 2.0 was the kind of cover name for the hacker.
They came up with this name pretending to be like a sequel to Gutschiffer, who was a true independent hacker.
Gutschiffer 2.0 published some of these emails.
They were in the Word documents, there were Russian language formatting errors.
Like they loaded them and edited them on a computer with Russian as its default language.
Wow.
That's pretty bad, right?
I mean, ultimately, though, I just think that, and yeah, I think even Glenn Greenwald agreed to this eventually.
When the FBI publishes a full indictment with listing all this evidence and even the search terms used by these hackers, because clearly they got that stuff from Google or whoever, that is a conspiracy that is pretty easy to debunk.
If, like, the stuff listed in this indictment is just fully false, like all of it, it would just take so much.
It's just like eventually, just on top of the things that I just mentioned quickly, it's just the preponderance of the evidence suggests, yes, Russia hacked the DNC.
I mean, of course they did.
Like, I don't know.
Clearly, like, there were sort of like, it's just become such a part of like this very polarized debate that I feel like these sides are not talking to each other.
But But, like, the people who are saying the story you just told about Hillary Clinton and Ukraine and stuff, like, how do they account for this, like, blatant, glaring evidence of, like, Russian fingerprints on this stuff?
Right, right.
You know?
Well, it is true that Hillary's campaign had a very tight relationship with the leader of Ukraine at that time.
And they were constantly going back and forth dealing with them.
And especially during that time, and, you know, going back to Maidan and all that.
But that's neither here nor there.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine to.
And I, you know, Ukraine, like, I remember I visited the embassy and even the State Department officials I spoke to were like, this place is so fucking complicated.
Yeah.
Like, nothing is like what it seems here.
I was kind of freaked out talking to them.
But, you know, I've also found that, like, and I think it's become more clear cut, like, that yes, Ukraine is the victim of a massive amount of Russian oppression over decades, centuries, and now a full year of full scale invasion.
So, Like, I don't know.
Like, I'm, yes, I think it made sense for the US to support Ukraine at that time and to support the Maidan revolution.
Yes, I mean, like, I'm, I guess I'm like a kind of just straight up pro Ukrainian person, although I, I acknowledge that there's, you know, as I've said, there's corruption there.
There's like extremism of certain kinds.
It's like, I'm not a Ukrainian nationalist, but I, but I'm a Ukraine supporter.
There's a lot of, a lot of meat on the bone there.
I want to do another podcast soon.
We got to figure that out, but your ride is here.
Linking to Traces in the Dark00:00:48
So, everyone, I will link.
I'll just put a link to your book, your new book, Traces in the Dark, in the description.
People want to learn more.
I highly suggest listening to the episodes you do with Julian Dory on his podcast.
They're fucking fascinating.
They cover every single detail.
Where else can people go to learn more about what you're doing and find you on the web?
Yeah, you can find me on like, that's my personal website.
You can find me on Wired too and just see what I'm up like writing on a daily basis.
But yeah, my website does like, I usually put up like the big, like deep dive features that I do.
Like I do only like, you know, a couple of those a year.